Everything Bad is Good for You

I picked this book up on a whim (and partly to make sure that I got free shipping on an order from Amazon) a few weeks ago. It sat around collecting dust until Sunday morning when I at last picked it up. I put it down a few hours later having finished it. It was one of the most fascinating books about today's culture that I've ever read.

I found many of its suppositions and depictions of people, especially those nerd-like individuals like myself, to be entirely accurate. In short, the book discussed how many of the supposed "bad" things in our culture like TV and Video Games have lead to a progressively increasing intelligence level (known as a "Sleeper Curve"). This trend had gone largely unnoticed for an extended period of time due to the fact that IQ tests are adjusted periodically (made increasingly difficult) so that the average score remains a 100.

The increasing complexity of television shows and movies, in the sense that there are multiple threaded plot lines and a greater viewer responsibility to guess exactly what's happening, have led to an increased mental demand, which Steven Johnson supposes is responsible for the increasing intelligent levels. Video games were shown to be useful for the manner in which they train the mind to gather and process information from a variety of sources much more efficiently than it otherwise functions.

"It's nice to be able to watch TV, talk on the phone, and read your e-mail all at the same time, but it's a superficial skill, not a deep one. It usually involves skimming the surface of the incoming data, picking out the relevant details and moving on to the next stream. Multimedia pioneer Linda Stone has coined a valuable term for this kind of processing: continuous partial attention. You're paying attention, but only partially. That lets you cast a wider net, but it also runs the risk of keeping you from really studying the fish." - pg. 69

As a culture we're so inundated with a multitude of information streams on a continuous basis. Thus, our minds have "shifted" to compensate for this, and while I never really noticed the shift, I can certainly attest to assimilating information in this particular manner.

The premise of this book is in stark contrast to a paper I wrote a few years ago, Idiocy is Increasing, on how the shear volume of data produced on a continuous basis is making us more and more ignorant in relation to the available data.

All in all I award it

(out of five random shapes)