Second Text (Long Excerpt)

In "Everything Bad Is Good For You", Steven Johnson argues that digital media and popular culture hone different mental skills than the ones exercised by reading books, although both hold equal importance. Johnson claims that even though video gaming should not be an enjoyable experience due to all of the work required, reward circuits in the brain cause us to inherently seek out satisfaction, and video games hold the promise of getting it right above our noses.

Of course, Johnson is smart enough to know that just because something happens to fit our reward circuits does not mean it's good for us. He acknowledges this, and even likens video gaming to crack cocaine, in that both provide the same addictive satisfaction. However, he still believes that we gain notable benefits from video gaming. He points out that video gaming allows kids to absorb and understand information about the world that they might tune out had it been conveyed to them in the format of a teacher in a classroom. He uses his nephew, who learned about what lowering industrial tax rates would do to a city from playing Sims.

Also, in his particularly effective beginning, Johnson paints a picture of a world were reading and books came into existence after video games. The passage refers to libraries as scary places where "dozens of young children, normally so vivacious and socially interactive, sitting alone in cubicles, reading silently, oblivious to their peers".

And while I did enjoy reading his book, I just can't agree with it. For one, I find a couple contradictions in his arguments. While he says that reading provides a social disconnect, and causes isolation from peers, he seems to find "finding yourself hunched over a computer screen, help guide splayed open on the desk, flipping back and forth between the virtual world and the level maps...you find yourself reading the help maps over dinner" to be perfectly acceptable. Ummm...hello disembodiment! This guy is not even enjoying or experiencing his food because he is mentally removed from his body in the task of solving a problem that does not even exist in the physical world, but is rather a mashing of codes and graphic images that have been deliberately created by another person to make money off of him, and boost this sense of individualism and success-can-be-yours mentality that capitalism so heavily relies on.

I think it happens like this: when a video game is successfully completed, it causes the player to feel as if they have accomplished something, that they have succeeded, that this is something they did. However, in the cases Johnson describes, the gamers seem to consult their manuals (in written text format none the less) to make it from one stage to another, the entire time. Unfortunately, life does not come with a handy manual, and so the skill that the kids are actually using is reading the text information they are given and applying it to an altered (although realistic) reality. I'd even say that by kids needing these guides so badly (as Johnson describes) they will be more open to allowing corporations to oh-so-gently help them and nudge them in the "right" direction in their physical life as well, by telling them what products they will need to succeed, and selling them ideas of individualism to keep them feeling good (read: oblivious) about the whole thing. And thus the capitalist machine blooms.