TV may not be so bad for you after all

gzlaser

HOW often have you been told that watching TV, movies or playing video games is bad for you? What if they were actually making us smarter?

In an original and highly entertaining book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, US author Steven Johnson dares to challenge conventional wisdom, by arguing that popular culture is not making us dumber; in fact, it is making us more intelligent.

He suggests that popular culture we consume every day, from computer games to cartoon movies like The Simpsons and Finding Nemo, are becoming steadily more complex. As a result, they are exercising our minds in new and increasingly strenuous ways.

\"For decades we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path towards the lowest common denominator,\" Johnson writes. \"But in fact the opposite is happening. The culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less\".

Take television for example. Johnson says that modern television demands more from its audience than programs from previous decades. In the past, he argues, programs were very simple: they had one plot that started and ended by the end of each episode.

Today's television is much more complex and difficult to follow. Programs have multiple threads, some of which carry on from previous episodes and others that are left open for the future. There are far larger casts to keep track of and more intricate plots.

It is the same with video games. \"The thing you almost never hear in the mainstream coverage is that games are fiendishly, sometimes maddeningly, hard.\"

The interactivity and open-endedness of video games are absent from books. While most video game characters lack the psychological depth of those in a novel, the essential value of the games is that they exercise a particular set of \"mental muscles\".

Johnson also briefly touches on the positive impact of the Internet and cinema. He is careful throughout to acknowledge the virtues of traditional high culture, such as books. He is not saying one form of culture is better than the other, simply that there is value in both.

What you end up with is a book that is as delightfully entertaining as it is enlightening - a wonderfully paced 200-page read. Relying on a mixture of statistics and examples to back up its points, the book is easy to read but still maintains its persuasiveness.

On the downside, Johnson's argument that the whole thrust of pop culture is having the effect of enlarging mental capacity is very simplistic. He chooses not to address the negative impact of pop culture, such as high levels of sex and violence or the influence of advertising.

Nonetheless, the book helps to provide balance to the often one-sided argument that TV, films and interactive entertainment simply wastes away your brain. It is a tightly written polemic which challenges the common wisdom on every level, and makes you think again about those many hours you thought you had wasted.