Everything bad is good for you: Micro Review
I would have loved to take this book and show it to my wife — “See? I told you that all those hours playing video games and binging Stranger Things are making us SMARTER !!!”. Sadly, I won’t be honest to myself.
In his book, Johnson argues that popular culture / mass media is getting a lot more complex and thus making the consumers (us) smarter. I don’t disagree with the first part of his hypothesis.
24 (the TV series) probably has 100x complex plot than The Tramp (Charlie Chaplin’s silent classic). But IMHO, “The Tramp” teaches a lot more about humanity, chivalry and relationship than 24. And the video games today (like Fortnite) probably has 1M x more lines of code than “Dangerous Dave” and requires a lot more thinking but I am not sure its making me any smarter.
One of the biggest flaw of his hypotheses is NOT considering that the motivation behind popular media is not to make us smarter, its to make money. The games today are designed to be addictive and media is created to grab max eyeballs !!!
The only pass that Johnson gets on this is that he wrote this book in the pre smartphone era. Its still an interesting read and you might be tempted to agree with everything Johnson says but do pause for a second and try to be honest to yourself :) #culture
