Popular culture is an essential element of the society and often tends to be criticized as leading the youth towards vile lives, immoral and making them dumber. Few dare to counterattack and say the opposite, supporting the idea that all this new information that surrounds us is actually making us smarter and helping our brains. Steven Johnson, an American popular science author and media theorist, actually argues that the more complex the media has become in the past century, the sharper have the people’s thinking skills evolved.
His book, “Everything Bad is Good for You”, published in 2005, wishes to convince the reader of the way the popular culture has become “more complex and intellectually challenging over the past thirty years”, more demanding of “cognitive engagement”, the fragment given focusing on games, like APBA, Dungeons & Dragons or Diplomacy and putting emphasis on their ability to change the way the author’s generation thought, spent their free time and even solved problems. Johnson says that the usual saying “children should read more” is nothing but a “conventional wisdom” example and tries to compare the necessity of reading to the advantages of gaming. He even offers the example of a “2004, National Endowment for the Arts” study that showed how “reading for pleasure had declined steadily among all major American demographic groups”, whose writer analyzed the differences between the people who read and the ones that do not.
The author suggests that the