Popular Culture and stupidity

The information in Johnson's book was very interesting and he had some valid points. I do agree that there are many things in today's popular culture that do provide great arenas for learning. His points about some of the knowledge gained from certain types of gaming is quite accurate. If you do spend time playing very complex, multi-layered games you can exercise your decision making skills, your ability to strategize, hypothesize, etc. The same can be said for high quality TV and film, there are things to be learned in every medium when the end product is well developed and written to appeal to higher order thinking. So, on the whole, I do not believe that videogames are evil and useless. Nor do I think that people would be better off only playing Zelda than reading a book or playing a sport. There is a place for all of it in a balanced life.

I do believe, however, that he bases most of his "electronic media is good" argument on a small percentage of the actual end product. While he puts forth an effort to say that the dreck of today is still better dreck than the past, really I cannot find that a compelling argument for it's worth.

I guess the bottom line is he believes that media shapes the culture rather than culture shaping the media... a bit like the chicken and the egg...which did come first? He has not convinced me that media drives the cultural and intellectual advances.