Lew Rockwell has posted a stupendous and shockingly-insightful review of Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Readers of this blog are acquainted with the genius and oh-so-modest reviewer. Link. Two excerpts:
1.
Johnson has used his understanding of the mind and popular culture to make two novel arguments:
1. The popular culture is not "dumbing down." Rather, it is getting more sophisticated.
2. This increasingly-sophisticated culture is making us smarter.
The first argument, he makes convincingly. I never would have believed it, if it weren't for Johnson, but he leaves no doubt that today's entertainment is far more sophisticated than, say, the entertainment in the 1970s.
The second argument, however, fails almost as decisively as the first argument succeeds.
2.
I can sympathize with Johnson, to an extent. He makes such a convincing case that the pop culture has gotten more sophisticated, and we're spending so much time using it, it would be a shame for it not to amount to something.
But he has no evidence that it does. He spends the most time talking about IQ scores, which have been increasing lately. How lately? Over the course of the last 100 years! The new cultural sophistication, which by Johnson's account started in the early 1980s, can't account for the IQ increases prior to the early 1980s. To get around this, he says IQ's have been increasing at a sharper rate in recent years. His support: "average scores in the Netherlands . . . increased 8 points between 1972 and 1982."
This piece of evidence is so inapt that I feel like I'm beating up a straw man: Hill Street Blues was an American show that started in 1981. The sophisticated video games Johnson lauds didn't begin to get produced until the late 1970s (Atari's Adventure debuted in 1978).
To be blunt, Johnson's facts in support of this second argument are absolutely horrible.
