Is Just Becoming Smart Good?

Reviews the book, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson (see record 2005-09691-000). This book is an old-fashioned work of persuasion that ultimately aims to persuade you of one thing: that popular culture has, on average, grown more complex and intellectually challenging over the past 30 years...making our minds sharper (p. xiii). Today's popular culture is complexly expressive of and causative of our psychosocial morbidities. We are a nation of avid consumers, and we should hold ourselves--not just the proximate producers-responsible for today's popular culture. Consumers have a choice about whether to tune in or tune out, and we can come up with something better. Right now, people are beginning a trend using new technology, especially the Internet, to produce news programs and newspapers of their own, obviating the present corporate media powers and creating media that are truly interactive. As for video games, perhaps some creative souls will be inspired by, for instance, the Peace Corps or Doctors Without Borders to dream up something both smart and good. Intellectual sophistication needs to be combined with commitment to the collective good. Otherwise, no matter how smart we become, life will not be good, and that is not wise. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)