Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You is a quick read. It's a few days' worth of tub & toilet reading for folks like me who do 90% of their reading in the bathroom--the only room in their house without a computer or TV. EBiGfY is fun, well-written, and self-described as an "old-fashioned work of persuasion" (meaning that you're not going to get the other side of the argument.) The basic idea is that popular culture media (television shows, videogames, films, the internet, etc.) have been steadily increasing in complexity (but not necessarily sophistication) since the 50s. He calls this "The Sleeper Curve," a joke borrowed from a Woody Allen film. Johnson reveals that TV shows now have more characters, threads, and subplots. Games are so complicated you need a strategy guide just to beat them. Films haven't changed as much as the rest of pop culture, but even there we can see how the LotR trilogy is far more complex than Star Wars. Not to put to find a point on it, kids and couch potatoes are sucking wholesome Vitamin D milk from their boob tubes.

Johnson also points at "The Flynn Effect" to support his claims. The "Flynn Effect" is a steady increase in the average IQ score (across the board) over the decades. Of course, Johnson points to the trends in pop culture as the cause of this increase. A key point here is that IQ doesn't measure what we might call "emotional intelligence" or "content-based learning." In other words, you might roll an 18 intelligence score but a 3 for wisdom. You've got to stop reading word problems and start reading problematic words, specifically those from dusty old canons. Be Kirk--not McCoy or Spock. You don't want to be stopped on the street and not know the major players in the Civil War or the key differences between Groucho and Karl Marx.

Of course, the fun thing to say about a book like this is why Johnson didn't present his ideas in another media. However, doing so would miss some of Johnson's argument. He's not saying that we don't need "content-based education," nor is he denying that we learn some things much better by reading about them. However, he does think that we learn a different set of skills--no less important--by playing videogames and watching television, and these skills may turn out to be more valuable to tomorrow's workforce than literary analysis.

Anyway, I've got to get back to my Grim Fandango. BTW, Myst V is most excellent--buy it immediately for some bonus intelligence points.