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Book: Everything Bad Is Good for You

20.Apr.2007

I’ve read some months ago Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson, an American journalist and the founder of the outside.in portal. In this book, the author tries to prove that the all the media that usually have a bad reputation, when it comes ti their influence on society, really are improving our mind. Tv series, movies and even video games complexity seems to be increasing, specially when you look at the most popular shows/games. Several examples are given, like the game SimCity and The Soprano series, trying to prove what Steven called the Sleeper’s curve, that the media isn’t leading the society to a sort vegetative state.

There was a need for a book like this, an objective analyzes of the current media/society relation, that isn’t trying to prove that the new content given to us is either good or bad, but simply that it’s creating a different kind of society, more open to the outside stimulations and to the world’s network of information.