Everything Bad is Good for You: how today's popular culture is actually making us smarter.

EVERYTHING BAD IS GOOD FOR YOU: HOW TODAY'S POPULAR CULTURE IS ACTUALLY MAKING US SMARTER

BY STEVEN JOHNSON

NEW YORK: RIVERHEAD BOOKS. 238 PAGES. $24.

Although American popular culture has long been described as a breakneck race to the bottom, Steven Johnson has a different story to tell. Johnson, a Wired commentator and author of Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life, convincingly argues for a phenomenon he calls the Sleeper Curve, named after Woody Allen's sci-fi spoof in which scientists of the future are amazed that cream pies and hot fudge were once viewed as unhealthy. According to Johnson, the part of culture that many consider low-brow trash isn't just growing increasingly engaging and demanding, it's actually making us smarter. That's right--those hours you spend in SimCity adjusting the tax rates in the suburbs of your virtual community and those nights you blow off reading the most recent Ian McEwan novel to watch the latest episode of The Apprentice aren't just a shameless waste of time. Rather, you're engrossed in an enriching experience that exercises your problem-solving skills and enhances your social intelligence! Gamers who interact with virtual worlds, Johnson observes, actually engage in a data-gathering, hypothesizing, and testing process that mirrors the scientific method. Reality-show viewers, he asserts, participate more actively than viewers of other forms of televised entertainment, reading the motivations and hidden agendas of the onscreen contestants, thereby sharpening their social dexterity and increasing their ability to respond to other people's emotional signals.

But if Johnson offers a persuasive case for the cognitive benefits of the media we consume as a culture, his unfailingly objective perspective at times seems to have a blind spot that's mirrored by the frustratingly concrete nature of his prose: He misses what gives our culture, even at its trashiest, so much of its richness and depth in the first place. Though the narrative complexity of The Sopranos far surpasses that of Dallas, as Johnson argues, what's considerably more striking is the former's filmic qualities: the spare editing and subtle crafting of scenes into a whole so thematically tight that each episode serves as its own oddly sublime fable. Elsewhere, Johnson cites evidence that children who play Tetris score higher on visual recognition tests, but he sidesteps the incalculable emotional and psychological benefits of games (now nearly extinct) in which children create something out of nothing; constructing forts out of branches and tires, or inventing elaborate contests involving a deflated kickball and a rusty swingset. Having a wide range of media to sink our teeth into may enrich our problem-solving skills, but what about our creativity? And what about the subtle ways in which the lyrical universes that unfold to us in books give our perspectives an imaginative buoyancy that can't be measured?

Johnson's challenge to the oft-repeated lament that mass culture is dumbing down is as enlightening as it is necessary, yet his primary focus on cognitive gains doesn't feel complete without an acknowledgment of certain slippery, intangible qualities we look for in our culture--emotional weight, poetic resonance, poignancy, inventiveness--qualities that not only shape our experience of the world around us but form the fabric of our character as human beings.