Everything Bad Is Good For You Summary

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In the book Everything Bad Is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter, Steven Johnson talks about how various forms of pop culture grew more sophisticated over time and how the general public criticizes it. He presents his findings in which he shares his arguments and analysis by dividing the book into two parts: first, he starts arguing about how video games, television, the internet, and film developed to become more complicated in contemporary society over the last few years. Then, he starts talking about how all of the different forms of pastime are related to the elevation of intuition. Johnson’s argument about popular culture is not valid because he leaves out certain things, puts something to make his argument look good, and not being direct. This section encompasses a summary of Everything Bad Is Good For You. Johnson begins his book by stating that his purpose in writing this book is to convince whoever is reading it to look at popular culture in a positive connotation rather than a negative one. He provides his personal experiences and explains cultural interpretations about the overused sayings in terms of entertainment in general. He uses this as a starting point for his thesis,…show more content…
Television is known as a babysitter, zone out into a couch potato, and even a time consuming ideal. Johnson’s argument here is that TV has improved so much over time, whereas the general public says the complete opposite. The shows in today’s society have more complicated storylines for viewers to catch and fuller social webs. Johnson takes a look and compares three shows that were shown back in the 1980s: “Starsky and Hutch” to “Dragnet” to “Hill Street Blues” to “The Sopranos” to demonstrate how the sophistication of narratives in television dramas has changed over time. Moreover, reality TV is actually more complicated in comparison to shows back then, such as the game
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