With the same winning combination of personal revelation and friendly scientific explanation he displayed in last year's Mind Wide Open, Steven Johnson shatters the conventional wisdom about pop culture as pabulum*, showing how video games, television shows and movies have become increasingly complex.

Johnson lays out a strong case that what we do for fun is just as educational in its way as what we study in the classroom.

I had drifted away from Johnson's blog in recent months, and so I didn't even know that his new book was due in May. But with the benefit of prominent placement at Barnes and Noble, the book promptly found its way into my library.

Frequent readers of MemeStreams will be generally familiar with many of the issues that Johnson threads together in "Everything Bad", but the book connects them in an interesting way to make what some will see as a contrarian argument about the state of today's media. Johnson also offers up some unique gems, as well; his quantitative structural analysis of one-hour television dramas is my favorite such example.

Although it's being marketed as a book, this is really more of an extended essay. It's structured like an essay, and I believe it is meant to be read like one; I finished it the same evening I bought it. Ample end notes provide support to the argument and serve to send readers off on interesting tangents after Johnson's has made his case. I expect that stevenberlinjohnson.com will be the site of some worthy discussion threads in the days and weeks to come.

Recommended.

P.S. Johnson will be in Los Angeles on Tuesday, May 10 at Vroman’s Bookstore, before moving on to San Francisco for Wednesday and Thursday.

* pabulum, n. something (as writing or speech) that is insipid, simplistic, or bland

Everything Bad Is Good for You