Grand Theft Auto as Kaplan Test Prep

I enjoyed Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good For You. I had seen it referenced in a Malcolm Gladwell article a year or two ago and was excited to have the opportunity to read it. Johnson made some interesting points, and I think his main thesis is right: the world of popular culture is getting more complicated. Drastically so, in most cases.

However, I’m not sure I agree that this move towards complexity is as beneficial as Johnson makes it out to be. Video games, it seems to me, must develop further problem solving skills, and I think the participatory nature of these games is an interesting idea that has not yet been realized within the classroom. But what are the sacrifices of a concept of literacy that values a clusterbomb of information over development of sustained, nuanced arguments?

This question is addressed in an interesting essay that provides a nice counterpoint to Johnson’s book (and not in a reactionary, The Dumbest Generation sense). Writing in The Atlantic, Nicolas Carr discusses the effects of new literacies on mental ability in an essay entitled “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” At one point, Carr writes,

As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

This is a trend that seems as equally plausible as Johnson’s theory of the Sleeper Curve. I’d consider the question further, but I need get in a few hours of Halo 2… after all, it’s like doing frontal lobe calisthenics!