Technology, science, and trend author Steven Johnson has a new book that strikes to the heart of a traditional argument for nonprofit culture in American communities. Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter challenges the common assumption that popular culture makes us stupid, which, by extension, challenges the intellectual high ground claimed by nonprofit culture.
As quoted in this Boston Globe book review, Johnson shows a massive increase in plot complexity, interaction, and narrative style in popular culture (television, film, video games, etc.), which he claims requires and fosters a higher level of brain function:
The greater complexity, Johnson argues, is ”creating minds that are more adept at certain kinds of problem solving.” Thus, he says, today’s pop culture is ”largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down.”
It’s an interesting issue on the heels of the RAND report, ”Gifts of the Muse,” which explored the benefits of cultural experience (with a heavy bias toward nonprofit culture). And it’s bound to generate conversation on the blogs (as it already has).
Johnson wrote two of my favorite nonfiction technology/trend books — Interface Culture and Emergence — so this one is high on my summer reading list…or I could just wait for the TV miniseries.
Or perhaps this could mean that since people are more used to complicated narratives and thinking in an interactive way they could now be more prepared to go to the theatre. Now we just need to find and convince the un-indoctrinated that it’s not any harder or scarier than what they seem to be used to in the world of media.
This might not exactly relate, but there is also the arguement that having so many choices available at all times in terms of “what to watch” or “what to play” and having so much information available instantly is creating a generation of young adults with no attention span. It seems that if we can’t find information instantly, it’s not worth researching. If a movie, play, etc doesn’t grab our attention instantly it’s not worth hanging around to watch. Higher intelligence does not do society all that much good if we do not have the attention span to use all those good brain cells.