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07/07/2005 Archived Entry: "Everything Bad is Good for You"
Everything Bad is Good for You
Big shout out and thank you to Collin who sent me Steven Johnson's Everything Bad is Good for You for winning the 1000th comment contest. Johnson's book is a good read and a necessary read for anyone interested in thinking about media in complex ways.
Johnson’s argument (in McLuhanist fashion) is that the content of media, like video games and television, does not affect us so much as the form of media does. That form, which encourages multi-threaded thinking, interactivity, complexity, and other features, has caused changes in how we structure and generate information. Instead of focusing on the violence or nudity such media display, we should think about how these media generate new rhetorical moves.
I agree completely. One of the more interesting points throughout the book is the role complex one hour TV dramas play in our thinking habits. The ability to weave together many narrative threads at once and to identify patterns and connections among those threads (like we often do when we watch The Sopranos or Six Feet Under) is a rhetorical skill relevant for new media work. In that sense, it's a writing skill as well. The sharpening of the [average person's] mind can't be measured at the extremes of intellectual achievement. Instead, we should detect that improvement somewhere else, in the everyday realm of managing more complex forms of technology, mastering increasingly nuanced narrative structures - even playing more complicated video games. (156)
This is the kind of thinking I often blog about in one of my many rants against contemporary composition pedagogy. Most textbooks and practices today work towards simplicity, not complexity. Whether it is in short pieces of writing students are asked to write (500 - 1,000 words) or whether it is what they write about (abortion, parking on campus, updated what I did last summer type essays) or whether it is the media form itself (paragraph by paragraph structure in which a topic sentence is required either at the beginning or at the beginning of every paragraph) or whether it is ideological (make your writing clear and coherent), simplicity is the norm. Contemporary media, as Johnson notes, is getting more and more complex. The discrepancy between our teaching and the media which shapes our thought and culture, therefore, is profound. We can get all antsy about national commission reports on writing all we want, but that is the wrong avenue to take; we need to start thinking more about media as writing and how media demands and pushes complex thinking and production. We need to stop fretting over how to measure ability (S.A.T., placement exam) and instead start designing curricula which works with and teaches to the logic of new media.
Replies: 1 Comment
I was told that fried Snickers are bad for you. Does this mean they're good for you? What about candy corn pie?
Posted by Lulu P. Giant @ 07/08/2005 10:38 AM EST