Everything Bad Isn’t    A Review of Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Pop Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter Steven Johnson  (©2005, Riverhead, ISBN 1573223077 )

 

The fundy faithful enjoy finding what is wrong with the culture at large and excoriating it. Unfortunately for them, Steven Johnson (author of Emergence and Mind Wide Open,) has released his latest pop-commentary on pop-culture, Everything Bad is Good For You. The premise of the book is that the conventional wisdom that all the things that are supposed to be bad for us, aren’t really. He posits that culture (the mélange of games, television and movies) is far more complex than it used to be and that one has to be far more sophisticated to “get it” now than in the past. His book has generated a lot of buzz in both online discussion and print media.

 

Johnson begins by showing how games and gaming are far more intricate and interactive than the pundits have assumed. The conventional thinking is that playing games helps young people develop hand-eye coordination. Johnson says that such a statement is the equivalent of saying that reading books helps develop eye coordination. It may be true but it misses the whole point of reading books. Gaming needs to be viewed in the same way, that is, the primary activity of gamers takes place in their heads, not in their hands. Johnson then discusses what happens in gamers heads when they are playing games and how it affects their thought processes.

 

The point is that Gamers think differently, learn differently and believe differently than their non-gaming Boomer counterparts. Gamers tend to be more sociable, are more likely to take risks for potential rewards, prefer to be rewarded on their abilities but also trust that there is a certain amount of luck to the world. One of the most important differences between Gamers and Boomers is that Gamers tend to take the “meta-view” of things. Because gamers can shift views in the virtual world with a flick of the controller, they translate this into an ability to see themselves from an observer/outsider point of view in their own lives. This leads them to be less attached to their viewpoints and more subject to revision with additional information. They are more flexible and less opinionated.

 

This also leads to Gamers having a more global view of life and their country’s place in the world. When teens are getting up before the crack of dawn to play a MOG (multiplayer online game) because that is when the team from Germany is online, we have truly opened the lines of cross-cultural communication in an unprecedented way. Johnson highlights a number of lessons but does not go into the depth of Gordon Gee’s book, What Video Games Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Johnson’s book is more of a populist treatment of the topic than a scholarly one which makes him more accessible to the general reader.

 

The book’s message for the church today is that there is an opportunity in the cultural shift we would be wise to notice. Most youth workers are unaware of the Boomer-Gamer gap because they’re gamers themselves. They find a number of mystifying things in their relationships with non-gamers in the church but chalk it up to them being old fogies who don’t handle change well, not realizing that these same old fogies participated in the last great cultural shift. Non-gaming Boomers are likewise mystified by the Gamers in their midst. It isn’t just the change in slang but the attitude in the conversation. Nor is it a generation gap because there are plenty of Boomers who are or were once Gamers themselves. This nearly invisible shift in worldview, outlook, attitude and approach to life sets Gamers apart from non-gamers.

 

Churches would be wise to tap into the collaborative spirit of Gamers and enlist their aid in church ministry. They should appreciate their ability to multi-task and concentrate on five things at once. They should tap into their use of technology and put their networking skills to work as internet evangelists. They should let the Gamers design the church web sites, making them more interactive, creative and imaginative. Let them present the Bible in new and engaging ways. Give them the freedom to express themselves in a Flash presentation with animated graphics on the church projection screens. Give them every opportunity to harness their unique talents to blog, to IM, to e-mail, to animate, to game in a context where they can reach an audience that some of us don’t even know exists.

 

Johnson also discusses the changes in other popular media as well. He describes how sit-coms and dramas are far more complex now than they were as recently as 25 years ago. The number of characters, the complexity of the story threads and character motivations of even the poorly made shows today are far beyond even the best shows of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Even children’s movies are released with sophisticated references to other pop cultural releases. For instance, Shrek and Shrek 2 contained numerous references and visual puns to Disney films, fairy tales and popular music that add layers of movie-watching enjoyment for viewers. The rise in popularity of DVD’s with additional commentary and the “making of” sections have created more informed movie watchers.

 

Everything Bad Is Good For You is a must-read for those who want to think outside of the black or white fundamentalist box. It opens the dialogue for a nuanced conversation about the impact of popular culture on those to whom we are ministering. While most Christian commentators condemn the content of popular media, they miss out on important aspects of what the form of the media is saying to us. By dismissing so much of what happens in the cultural milieu, they miss significant applications  for communicating the gospel message in a changing world. We might wish to bury our collective heads in the sand, but Johnson challenges us to think differently about what is really taking place in the world around us, to look beneath the surface and think seriously about what is taking place.

 

by Rick Presley