Hw 14- Everything Bad is Good For You

In "Everything Bad is Good For You", Steven Johnson talks about different aspects in technology that makes everyone smarter. He does this through analyzing things like tv and video games and the postive effects it may have on us.

In the chapter on video games, Steven Johnson talks about how it is not the content of the games that makes us smarter but the thought processes that the player goes through when playing the game. It teaches the player to analyze all the possibilites, make snap decisions, and strategize. Johnson calls this probing and scoping. Probing, exploring the game and find its limitations and using that and scoping, focusing on immediate problems while still maintaining a long term view. He argues this type of mental thought process can be applied in real life situations. Video games are designed to spike our dopaimine levels so we enjoy playing it and we learn these ways of thinking unintentionally as a result. He calls this the sleeper curve.

On Televison, Johnson says that it engages our brain in different things as well. It is more passive but He argues that since its invention, television shows have become more complex. Previously, things were spelled out for the viewer but it has come to a point where shows intentionally obscures so the viewers will infer for themselves. It makes viewers keep track of complex relationships which will engage the long term memory. But watching televsion has secondary affect. Watching actors go through a series of emotions, we learn to pick up emotional cues from their faces. In that way it would raise our emotional intelligence.

I thought the video games argument was interesting. Games are not much different from puzzles, you need to solve something. Instead of seeing what edge fits you encounter changing situations and have to make to make the "piece" was the right choice in order to go on to the next level. If puzzles are supposedly good for us, then video games should be as well, they both require us to use a mental function and they both are rewarding to us when we win. I thought it was interesting for him to say television is good for our memory because nowadays people don't have the extensive memory people as compared to people in history and this is because of technology. We no longer need to remember because we can write things down as notes. No one can recite the Oddesey from memory and that's because we can read it. So there's a mixed reaction on that. Remembering certain parts of a show does require the use of memory but that doesn't mean our memory is better than before. As for emotional intelligence, I think this can be true, because even though the actor is acting, they are portraying a feeling. That feeling has to arise from somewhere. I think we begin to recognize if its true or not. I bet we have had moments where we thought the acting for a show was horrible and that was because we could tell they were acting. The emotions were not realistic to us.

The most obvious way that EGIB4U and Feed contradicts each other is that one is saying Techonology is making us dumber, while the other argues that it is actually making us smarter. Feed does this by showing how the people in that society act, and is highlighted by Violet saying "We are raising a Nation of idiots". EGIB4U does so by analyzing what mental processes it might stimulate. But I think what they are analyzing is different. Feed is mainly analyzing the affects of technology and advertisement on people as consumers. But EGIB4U is focusing more on technology's direct affects on the brain, what skills people can gain from it. Feed is about the corporational use of technology, and the wayauthor of EBIG4U doesn't contradict Feed is that by citing all the positive effects of video games and television, he is promoting the products, which in turn promotes the advertisement that goes along with it. These books are about different things but have the same topic. They both offer different points of view and we can take different things away from both.