Everything Bad is Good For You

In Everything Bad is Good For You, Steven Johnson theorizes that pop culture, contrary to common opinion, is making us smarter. The book focuses on video games, TV and the Internet, with Johnson arguing that the increasing complexity of each medium forces us to expand our cognitive skills in order to interact with them. He notes, for example, that you need to be alert to follow the multi-thread plots in TV shows like 24 or Lost. Tuning out in front of the tube isn't an option.

Plenty of dumb or disposable pop culture is out there too (adding the meaning of the word Donezo to our vocabularies probably hasn't enriched our thought capacities any, but keeping track of the complicated, interconnected relationships of the teens who say it might have). Whether you agree with Johnson wholeheartedly or not at all, it's refreshing to see that people who aim to shape the discourse on pop culture are recognizing that it operates on an intelligence scale (dumbest to smartest) and shouldn't be written off as uniformly moronic.