Walter Kirn reviews Steven Johnson’s “Everything Bad Is Good for You” in the New York Times Sunday Book Review today. Johnson’s book is attracting quite a lot of coverage for making the apparently counter-intuitive proposal that watching a lot of television or playing a lot of video games is actually a Good Thing. Apparently, the glazed eyes of the inert couch potato are misleading. Kirn explains:”Johnson posits a number of mental mechanisms that are toned and strengthened by the labor of figuring out the rules of high-end video games and parsing the story structures of subtle TV shows. Playing physiologist, he asserts that the games address the dopamine system by doling out neurochemical rewards whenever a player advances to a new level or deciphers a new puzzle. These little squirts of feel-good brain juice aggravate a craving for further challenges, until the Baby Einstein at the joystick has worked himself into an ecstasy of problem-solving that, Johnson tells us, will serve him well in later life (though he’s vague about exactly how). Johnson calls the relevant intellectual skills ”probing” and ”telescoping,” and defines them as the ability to find order in bewildering symbolic territory. Wandering through labyrinths full of monsters keeps a person on his toes, that is, and this is good preparation for modern life — perhaps because modern life so closely resembles a labyrinth full of monsters.”I actually read an extract from Johnson’s book a few weeks ago. It was entertaining but it also came across like a piece of puffed up pseudoscience. He even included charts that compared the simple linear plot of “Starsky and Hutch” with the layered, “chordal” lines of multiple plots representing a typical episode of the Sopranos. (These dubious matrices were deployed to back up Johnson’s argument that far from dumbing down, popular culture over the last 30 years or so is actually getting more complex.) But it’s questionable whether multiple plotlines or bifurcating storylines actually equals a “greater” art work. If you accepted Johnson’s premise, would this mean that the average soap opera is a more challenging piece of work than, say, Waiting for Godot?