NORTHERN PLANNER

Finally finished Steve Johnson’s ‘Everything bad is good for you’ (thanks to a habit of reading about 3 books at a time it takes a while). I’ll get to his arguments in a sec, but first of all he writes like a dream. Instead of the didactic "I know more than you" style of so many books like this, he persaudes, he invites you to argue, he pulls you in. In short, it’s an entertaining read. That’s  good since the more people who are persuaded to read this the better.

You’re probably familiar with the book’s main premise by now – far from dumbing down, pop culture is making us smarter.The first, and meatiest  bit of this is the argument that the multi faceted complexity of modern TV, video games and even the internet demands quite different skillsets to what has gone before. Instead of the linear style of Pacman or Starsky and Hutch, video games like Grand Theft Auto teach us to make difficult decisions in complex environemts while Lost asks us to make sense of dense, interwoven plots, instead of spoonfeeding us.

It’s difficult to argue with this, first bit. Pop culture is more complex and more demanding than ever before, and it’s teaching people to embrace complexity. The implications for anyone in advertising are worth dwelling on for a second. If people are embracing non – linear complex entertainment, shouldn’t the communications we produce have a similar structure? If we insists on giving them simple, straight stories, won’t they reject them every bit as much as ‘I Love Lucy’? This is the main bit of learning I took from this book, since I’m not as convinced by the following argument that it makes us smarter, espescially as he openly contradicts this himself.

He argues that IQ’s have gone up, but admits that the causality is difficult to prove. Common sense suggest that it will help develop certain decisons making skills and probing and learning, but is that all that it takes to be smart?

He agrees that the beauty of books for example is the way they demand people to add their own imagination to make it real, which not only helps us to think in the abstract, but also enables us to follow long, complex narratives and arguments at a much deeper level. Books show us how real life unfolds. This enables us to question, and think for ourselves. Can pop culture ever replace this? Johnson admits not, and argues for balanced diet of traditional and modern entertainment.

So for me, this book is an argument for not dismissing modern culture out of hand, since it’s more rewarding than we previously thought. But it cannot make us smarter on it’s own, in other words, it’s an argument for moderation.

But my problem is this. Has this really made our culture any better? True, pop culture is better than we thought, but has it made people smarter about anything other than pop culture?  Continous Partial Attention shows how short attention spans are, how unwilling people are to grapple with longform information. To live with a longer, deeper argument for a while.

For sure, use of the internet means people are accessing more news and views than ever before, but do they examine in depth? I doubt they have the patience. For me culture will be going in the right direction when people are more willing to look at things in more depth, to question more and make up their own minds, to probe why things are instead of a dizzying array of things that just ‘are’.

How many people really understand what’s going on in Lebanon and the long history behind it? How many people have considered that the wars of the last century were about the re-organisation of empires, and this is ominously similar to what’s happening now with the rise of China? Has it become too easy for people to embrace the soundbites of David Cameron instead of examining the lack of real policy? At the moment, popular culture is teaching us to think about a lot of things at the same time, but not in any depth of real value.