Review of the Book "Everything Bad is Good for You"

Steven Johnson, author of Everything Bad is Good for You, takes different forms of pop culture that society negatively perceives, explains how they have evolved and discusses how these changes have positively impacted society as a whole. This is, in Johnson's own words, the "Sleeper Curve" - where even the most frowned upon forms of media benefit the development of society (Johnson, 9). He focuses on video games and television as examples of media, but discusses the internet and movies as well.
Johnson breaks his argument into two major parts. The first part includes each form of pop culture. He analyzes one type of media at a time, while displaying their increasing complexity over past years. Often, Johnson compares the present culture to the past. When reviewing the concept of "telescoping" or "the mental labor of managing... simultaneous objectives," he contrasts the objectives of the classic arcade Pac-Man to a recent Nintendo release The Legend of Zelda: the Wind Waker (Johnson, 45). The second major part explains how the examples from part one relates to the Sleeper Curve and how the Sleeper Curve connects to positive growth in society. Johnson shares a fact that "higher IQs [mirror] the increased complexity of... culture" (Johnson, 147). Overall, the structure of Johnson's persuasive is similar to that of an essay where the first part is his support, and the second part is his analysis.
Johnson applies many varying strategies to support his argument. To help the reader, Johnson used many references to modern pop culture such as "ER, The West Wing, Alias,
The author's style throughout his persuasive is casual. He wants to be able to connect with the reader so he directly holds a conversation with them by saying, "I want to be clear about one thing" (Johnson, 132). Yet at the same time, Johnson wants his audience to feel the effect of the Sleeper Curve so he implements phrases with enhanced vocabulary such as "exceed the cognitive demands" or "invariably whittle" (Johnson, 94). Evidently Johnson's tone is relaxed but sophisticated. Johnson writes engagingly so the audience stays with him through the end of his argument.
In total, Everything Bad is Good for You is an effective persuasive. Although the book is organized so that the reader does not encounter what the book advertises until the second part, Johnson's style and technique are captivating enough to keep the reader interested in what he has to say. Johnson does a particularly good job in debunking the counter argument to his statement that pop culture is good for society by opening with a hypothetical situation where books were invented after video games. Overall this book deserves an A. Johnson gave hope to society where no one else would, pop culture.