Is Everything Bad Really Good For Us?

Steven Johnson is a lucky man.

Once a respected -- albeit somewhat obscure -- technology journalist and nonfiction author, he recently watched his career undergo a dramatic, quick-change makeover (à la insipid FOX reality show "The Swan").

With the publication of his latest book, Everything Bad is Good for You (Riverhead; May 2005), the Brooklyn-based author has been shoved into a suddenly-adoring public spotlight, receiving critical acclaim everywhere from the New York Times (where Everything Bad ... was excerpted) to Salon, to the New Yorker and the San Francisco Chronicle.

On his Web site, Johnson notes with bewildered pleasure that -- so far -- the book's media buzz has been 90 percent favorable (and 10 percent negative).

OK, but from where we're standing, it looks a lot more like 100% favorable; we've seen Johnson all over the news and the Net, and are hard-pressed to find a review that doesn't kiss his butt.

Then again, considering his book's premise, the fact that the media loves Johnson isn't so surprising. Everything Bad is Good for You is a wholehearted endorsement of pop culture -- Johnson argues that everything we've been told is mind-killing drivel (TV, video games, and the ever-addictive Internet) has actually increased our IQs and made us smarter.

He argues that mass entertainment has grown more cognitively challenging over the last 30 years, and that TV shows of today -- particularly, multi-thread dramas like "Lost" and "24" -- have helped us learn focus, patience, retention, and "the parsing of narrative threads."

Right. So let's be honest -- it sounds like a lot of publicity-fueled hooey (does mass media really need its back scratched any more? It already sucks in gazillions of advertising dollars, not to mention millions of impressionable American minds).

I spoke with Johnson by telephone from his Brooklyn home to try to determine whether this guy was for real.

Laura Barcella: Have you been surprised by all the attention you've gotten from the book?

Steven Johnson: Yes and no. What's been surprising is the sheer volume of it. I knew this book was going to get more attention than my others because it is easier to describe and it's got the patrician hook, and people care about pop culture one way or the other. But I didn't realize it was going to be quite so crazy.

It's sparked this international conversation about the state of American pop culture. I did [an interview with an] Argentinean paper and a German paper today, and there have been dozens of articles about it overseas, not including England ...

The other interesting thing about it is that the criticism has come from the Left more than from the Right. And it may just be that the Right hasn't engaged with it yet. I did a show with a conservative-values person yesterday who was arguing with me about it. ... But generally [criticism has been] from a group that I'm much closer to philosophically -- progressive folks who don't let their kids watch TV because they don't like the ads and commercialism.

What happened in your conversation with the "conservative values" person yesterday?

It was perfectly civil. We had this funny exchange where he kept trying to make me out [as] this guy saying, "Your kids should be allowed to play Grand Theft Auto all day long."

I kept saying, "Look -- I think Grand Theft Auto is inappropriate for most kids," but the truth is that most video games are not violent. I say that right upfront, in the video game section of my book.

So why do you think some people are resistant to the idea that pop culture isn't all bad?

Well, it's a couple of different things. It's the oldest complaint in the cultural book that whatever the kids are up to today is no good. [Laughter.]

We went through this with rock n' roll, and now we're going through it with video games. And there is this technological learning curve, particularly with interactive stuff and games, where not only do [older people] not get it, but they literally can't sit down and ... understand how to play. There's part of kids' culture that the older generation just literally hasn't seen.