Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter is a book by Steven Berlin Johnson. In the book, Johnson claims that popular culture – and in particular television shows and video games – has grown more complex and demanding over time and is making us smarter.
Johnson states, "This book is an old-fashioned work of persuasion that ultimately aims to convince you of one thing: that popular culture has, on a...
more
Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter is a book by Steven Berlin Johnson. In the book, Johnson claims that popular culture – and in particular television shows and video games – has grown more complex and demanding over time and is making us smarter.
Johnson states, "This book is an old-fashioned work of persuasion that ultimately aims to convince you of one thing: that popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years."
Johnson derives the term Sleeper Curve from the Woody Allen film Sleeper in order to draw a comparison between the "scientists from 2173 [who] are astounded that twentieth-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge" and the current perception that popular culture is "locked in a spiral drive of deteriorating standards". The Sleeper Curve serves to "undermine the belief that . . . pop culture is on a race to the bottom,...
less
