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Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Pop Culture Is Actually Making

Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today's Pop Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter Paperback - 2005 - 1st Edition

by Johnson, Steven

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From the author of the New York Times bestseller Mind Wide Open comes a groundbreaking assessment of popular culture as it's never been considered before: through the lens of intelligence.

The $10 billion video gaming industry is now the second-largest segment of the entertainment industry in the United States, outstripping film and far surpassing books. Reality television shows featuring silicone-stuffed CEO wannabes and bug-eating adrenaline junkies dominate the ratings. But prominent social and cultural critic Steven Johnson argues that our popular culture has never been smarter.

Drawing from fields as diverse as neuroscience, economics, and literary theory, Johnson argues that the junk culture we're so eager to dismiss is in fact making us more intelligent. A video game will never be a book, Johnson acknowledges, nor should it aspire to be-and, in fact, video games, from Tetris to The Sims to Grand Theft Auto, have been shown to raise IQ scores and develop cognitive abilities that can't be learned from books. Likewise, successful television, when examined closely and taken seriously, reveals surprising narrative sophistication and intellectual demands.

Startling, provocative, and endlessly engaging, Everything Bad Is Good for You is a hopeful and spirited account of contemporary culture. Elegantly and convincingly, Johnson demonstrates that our culture is not declining but changing-in exciting and stimulating ways we'd do well to understand. You will never regard the glow of the video game or television screen the same way again.

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From the publisher

Steven Johnson is the author of the national bestsellers Everything Bad Is Good for You and Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, as well as Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software and Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate.

First line

EVERY CHILDHOOD HAS its talismans, the sacred objects that look innocuous enough to the outside world, but that trigger an onslaught of vivid memories when the grown child confronts them.

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Media reviews

Stimulating, iconoclastic, and strikingly original. (The Atlantic Monthly)[Johnson] makes the reader feel smart by providing new tools with which to understand technology. (Wired)Most thoughtful, literate...drawing analogies from a prodigious range of fields...provocative. (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)

About the author

Steven Johnson is the author of the national bestsellers "Everything Bad Is Good for You" and "Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life," as well as "Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains, Cities, and Software" and "Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate."