Reddit reviews Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter

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Dat is net zoiets als zeggen dat iemand die thuis, in de trein en bus graag door het raam naar buiten kijkt, gefixeerd is op glas.
Het gaat erom wat erachter gebeurt. Je zou als docent dit -ook alweer twaalf jaar oude- boek eens moeten lezen. Het is allemaal zo erg niet.

Actually, I've read something about tv being somewhat stimulating. Tv these days has so many sub plots that keeping track of it all takes a little brain power.

Playing a video game is more stimulating. You're developing strategies, saving in game money for that next item, etc..

If you're interested, I got these ideas from a book I read a couple years back:

https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/1594481946

It will, you should read Everything Bad is Good for You

Good arguments for the upsides to gaming.

So there is something to novels/tv shows/movies/video games which aren't "educational" as it's normally described.

One of the biggest advantages is the ability to critically think and compartmentalize important information and discard irrelevant details.

For example, when reading a particularly complex book you might need to keep track of a half dozen characters, a variety of details of history of those characters and motivations, their goals, and the background of the world and how that all relates. Being able to "get it" is good practice for dealing with complex situations in your own life. The story may be cheezy, or unrealistic, but if it takes some thinking to get what's happening that has value itself. That's the case even when the media is (insert novel/tv show/video game/movie you consider trash) as long as it isn't extremely straightforward.

There is a really interesting book which goes over this that I recommend Called Everything Bad is Good For You (Amazon link)

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-Steven-Johnson/dp/1594481946/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1246955706&sr=8-1

i was very surprised at how well done this book was. does a fantastic job of analyzing pop culture today (including video games) and how as dumb as we may think some things are (movies, video games, reality tv, etc...) they're all actually making us smarter and making us think more critically about what we are actually seeing compared to pop culture in the past.

I think you're embracing the fallacy that pop culture is bad.

May I suggest reading Everything Bad is Good For You by Steven Johnson or Sex, Drugs & Cocoa Puffs by Chuck Klosterman for an alternative perspective?

Just because popular culture includes stuff like The Jersey Shore and P. Reign doesn't mean that it is without value. The value in it may be different than the value some people THINK is in it, but value there is.

People like Johnson make the argument that the increasing social complexity of our popular culture actually makes us smarter. To answer against the usual critique that literary theorists don't engage "actual science," he takes a neurological approach to the argument using elements of an indisputably "hard science" to support his argument.

Klosterman takes an admittedly more theoretical route, engaging semiotics and post-modern theory to make a similar argument -- that popular culture has value, and the recent backlash against what many consider "valueless" pop culture is actually rather short sighted.

Anyhow, I agree with both of them (and many others) that pop culture intelligence is now a social currency with inherent value. Whether or not pop culture consists largely of morons like the Kardashians is actually beside the point. It doesn't matter what the pop culture is, it still contains millions shared references for humanity.

I think we are indeed describing two different kinds of reading. Sure I "read" a lot of things online, but if I tell people I love to read as a hobby and, after they ask what I like to read, tell them that I read the news and online forums, they'll laugh in my face. That's not what being "someone who reads a lot" is.

If that's the definition you're going by, then I'm a huge reader. I read dialogues of a lot of video games, I read instruction manuals when I need to learn how to do things, I read online comics, I read blogs, I read comments Reddit for hours and hours a week. All I do is read. But I've hardly touched a book in the last 11 years, when they stopped forcing us to read books in school.

Would you honestly call me someone who loves to read? I'll give you the credit of assuming that we both know that that's not what it means to be someone who "loves to read" or "reads a lot".

Also ironically, the only book I actually have read in the last decade disputes that reading is better for you than watching TV. It's called Everything Bad is Good For You, and it talks about why reading, particularly as a teenager/adult, is a very mentally passive activity, versus more mentally stimulating activities like playing video games, and that reading is generally only helpful as a child when you are still developing the language parts of your brain.

Everything Bad is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter, a book by Steven Johnson, would fit well into your research. Also, you definitely need some empirical data if you want to draw any meaningful conclusions, so look for published studies and objective articles on topics like aggression, physiological arousal, and prosocial development in game-playing demographics. The best thing for your thesis is to find some credible academic papers that arrive at a conclusion you disagree with ("games are bad, mmkay") and use them, as well. Biased research isn't valuable research.

There's a good book with a catchy title that talks in depth about this very thing.

There are a few summary points:

• In general terms: Video Games > Pleasure Reading (Non-Educational) > TV
  
• The TYPE of video game, TV, or reading you do matters much more than the format, for example:
  
• Puzzle solving games like the Zelda series is much better for the mind than Call of Duty type shooting games.
  
• Novels, especially of a high complexity, are better than Magazines.
  
• Shows that require you to think (examples used were Sopranos and The West Wing) are better than those that don't (examples used were Big Brother and American Idol).
  
• Video Games as a non-educational activity improve test scores the best because they are interactive, you have to both analyze a situation and then respond to it. This is especially beneficial if you are solving puzzles.
  
• Pleasure Reading, while not interactive, requires you to take in and analyze situations in order to understand the story. The more complex the analysis required, the better.
  
• Watching TV only requires sporadic analysis. In the more complex show your brain seeks to solve and connect storylines to make sense of it. In the less complex show you only passively absorb.
  
  In the book they looked at a study which took groups of kids/teens of varying ages (I remember it being 4th grade, 7th grade, and 10th grade) and divided the kids into 4 groups: Gamers, Readers, Watchers, and Listeners. The Listeners did nothing but listen to popular music and socialize. They tested all the kids at the beginning, middle, and end of the experiment. They used the test average from previous years as their baseline for comparison.
  
  They found that kids that played puzzle-solving video games improved their scores the most, readers the second most, and watchers the third most. Listeners scores actually decreased as compared to the average.
  
  The book also looks at a second study that used adults and finds similar results. Gamers > Readers > Watchers > Listeners.
  
  ------
  
  The tl;dr of it is, doing something with your brain is good regardless of the format, and the more interactive and engaging that medium is the better it will improve your thinking.
  
  /u/Rambo_Brit3's and his/her wife need to be more concerned with WHAT video games their son is playing rather than the fact that he enjoys video games. I don't know how complex "League" is (I'm assuming League of Legends simply because of its popularity). And the complexity of the game is an important factor.
  
  At least he's not getting stoned and listening to pop music.

http://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/1594481946

Sounds like Everything Bad is Good For You by Steven Johnson.

https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Bad-Good-You-Actually/dp/1594481946

There's a book you should read, by Steven Johnson, called Everything Bad is Good For You. Specifically a chapter about television and how increasing plot texture and complication is causing or correlating with the increasing intelligence of viewers. In it, he graphs the plot lines of older shows and newer ones to show comparison, and it really is quite interesting. I agree with you, OP, but only to an extent. That scene happened so fast that even Saul wasn't expecting it and didn't know what was going on, and the behind-the-scenes footage shows us that the pick-pocketing wasn't supposed to be noticeable at all. You caught it the first go round, whereas someone paying less than full attention might have needed to watch it another time or two.

there's a great book called "Everything Bad is Good For You" by Steven Johnson that talks about how video games, TV, and pop culture in general are actually making us smarter as a society due to the rise in media complexity. it's a great read, not too long, and definitely makes you feel better about binging a Netflix show or playing video games for a few hours. worth checking out if you're interested!