"How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter"

Lot of buzz on about this book: Kottke, boingboing, Gladwell review and the author's blog. The book recently topped some book lists

I like the book cover art, very eye catching. You can't miss it at the store. The tv power chord actually looks like a tail and the way the man holds up the tv, it's very satan-like

Johnson's point is clear, popular culture makes us smarter, but he does have the interesting distinction that it may not give us better morals


On Part 1
Johnson deals with different media in popular culture and how they have raised the bar of the Sleeper Curve

He spends a large part of the book analyzing games and gaming (video games), how we typically make unjust comparison with other medium (literary works for example). Johnson explains that games develop very interesting skills (probing and telescoping) that require a lot of active participation

I enjoyed the part about how most of us have created a game at one point in our childhood because of the limitations of the games we were playing. This fact underlies how the way we play games actually encompass discovering the game environment (the rules or physics of a game) and finding ways to beat it, a very unique ability

I could not help but find the whole chapter about games to be heavily biased towards boys though, when is the last time you seen a chick play Dungeons & Dragons

I like the term "continuous partial attention" when he talks about multitasking today (term coined by someone else actually)

The 2nd section of the book deals with Television and Johnson talks about its features in terms of multithreading, wtihdrawl of information

Shorter sections are devoted to the internet and film

Lastly in Part 1, Johnson points out that the movie medium has also steadily pushed the bar in requiring cognitive work but movies have also been stonewalled because they have one critical limitation, time. When games have required more and more time to complete (50 to 100 hours), television series now exercise their large canvass to span seasons, movies have been restricted to the 2-3 hour chunk. Great example in citing the most complex movie of the last decades being the Lord of the Rings trilogy, which span a good 10 hours in its extended edition

On Part 2
Johnson looks at evidence of us getting smarter, it's an important topic to tackle but I found it less interesting. He looks at IQ scores and other stats. It must be said that while SBJ is a fierce advocate of the growing complexity in popular culture (television, games, the internet), he does not want to take away from the quality of books and the rise of violence and sex in mass media. There's a silver lining that people get to experience violence in these otherworlds (tv, games) so they might not have to do so in real life. Also he points out that it might do good for some kids to be confronted to some adult situation, much like adults have to recognize the complexity in a child's activity. There's a good paragraph on why kids are so mesmerized by tv shows or what not. It's because at a young age, they are very curious about things that change and in a house environment, television (he cites puppet shows) provide the introduction of newness which they try to understand. Their apparant hypnosis is actually misred, it's more that kids are focused (same when they get into gaming mode to finish a game)


Good stuf

What I took away from it was the economic incentive of having complex work that promote repeat viewing/reading/playing. Johnson points out that not only are such work rewarding for the audience in terms of enjoyment, they are a huge reason the content producer are making money. Johnson mentions how movie studios get huge chunks of revenues from dvd sales as opposed to box office. A person would want to own a movie where they can still find interesting things to discover on subsequent viewing (the recent mind-twisting Mindhunters is an excellent example, Identity would fit nicely as well). I think his ideas work better in terms of video game and television series but this is something that I see a lot in works that I enjoy

Very entertaining read, a lot of hype on the internet for sure but Johnson makes some excellent points that most people, especially adults should really get familiar with