The New Yorker reviews Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You"

[gusl]

The New Yorker reviews Steven Johnson's "Everything Bad is Good for You", a book claiming that popular culture makes us smarter, explaining the Flynn effect.

Reading books chronically understimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying—which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical sound-scapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements—books are simply a barren string of words on the page. . . .
Books are also tragically isolating. While games have for many years engaged the young in complex social relationships with their peers, building and exploring worlds together, books force the child to sequester him or herself in a quiet space, shut off from interaction with other children. . . .
But perhaps the most dangerous property of these books is the fact that they follow a fixed linear path. You can’t control their narratives in any fashion—you simply sit back and have the story dictated to you. . . . This risks instilling a general passivity in our children, making them feel as though they’re powerless to change their circumstances. Reading is not an active, participatory process; it’s a submissive one.

Yes! Down with the static text medium!

I'm working on alternatives...


On homework:

One of the ongoing debates in the educational community, similarly, is over the value of homework. Meta-analysis of hundreds of studies done on the effects of homework shows that the evidence supporting the practice is, at best, modest. Homework seems to be most useful in high school and for subjects like math. At the elementary-school level, homework seems to be of marginal or no academic value. Its effect on discipline and personal responsibility is unproved. And the causal relation between high-school homework and achievement is unclear: it hasn’t been firmly established whether spending more time on homework in high school makes you a better student or whether better students, finding homework more pleasurable, spend more time doing it. So why, as a society, are we so enamored of homework? Perhaps because we have so little faith in the value of the things that children would otherwise be doing with their time.

Why aren't such policies based on science?

Comments

[spoonless.livejournal.com]

Pretty interesting article, I'd really like to believe that it's true. I thought I'd heard that test scores of Americans on standardized tests are steadily dropping relative to most other civilized countries (I remember Carl Sagan saying this at some point, but that was some time ago.) But I should probably go back and check to see if that's really true or just a rumor. It's much more encouraging to hear this about IQ, even though there are other reasons it might be increasing. And, of course, it may or may not measure anything that should properly be called "intelligence".

I agree that someone should do some controlled analysis of this so that we can adopt better policies. A lot of stuff is probably outdated, and maybe it never was the best anyway.

[trufflesniffer.livejournal.com]

That's really interesting. I'd read the article before (the name of the book being reviewed is Everything Bad is Good for You, btw. "Brain Candy" is the name of the article).

I guess this probably explains a lot of the disparities in IQ revealed in <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/027597510X/ref=pd_sxp_f/102-9692356-5303347?v=glance&s=books><i>IQ and the Wealth of Nations</i></a>. Do you know any good scientific articles on the Flynn Effect?

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

When reading a book, you have to imagine the setting, the characters, the sounds and all the little details that are not described by the narrative yourself.

When playing an modern, immersive 3D-game, all those things are provided for free, requiring no mental effort.

As you well know, the brain develops the skills you train it with. Therefore, kids who play games a lot have better hand-eye coordination and may have better analytical skills (depending on the type of games they play), but kids who read a lot tend to be more creative.

The social interaction online multiplayer games provide is certainly interesting, but also limited: Players interact through text and avatars, not face-to-face, and seldom by voice. Children in the past spent much less time reading (isolated) than children now spend playing games. The rest of the time, kids played with other kids, interacting face-to-face.

So in short, I think there's a lot wrong with Johnson's analysis, even though I am not against computer games. Someone who describes books as "a barren string of words on the page" doesn't really understand reading.