essential poptimist reading

[jauntyalan.livejournal.com]

I was originally going to write quite a long bit about this book, but then I thought I might save that up and just ask YOU LOT if any of you have read it.

Not everything in it rings true, but the core observations (mass/pop culture is getting more cognitively demanding), and the fundamental inference (our brains WANT to be challenged) are things that everyone here will probably agree with. It's never a good thing to agree wholeheartedly with an argument/book, at least it feels wrong/uncomfortable to me, but my disagreements here are minor to trivial.

indeed the "mass/pop culture is getting more cognitively demanding" thing is so obviously true, but he actually goes into quantifiable specifics in a nice way. plus it's nice to have someone actually bloody well saying so forthrightly and in public, rather than the usual crap "going to hell in a lowest common denominator handbag"

he doesn't actually touch on music much at all (i'm going back to find that bit, cos there was something ironically slightly rockist about singles v albums he mentions) but it's still poptimism.

anyway. anyone?

Comments

[koganbot]

OK, I haven't read the book, so I don't know the argument Johnson's making when he's saying culture "as a whole" is becoming more demanding and complex. Demanding in what way? It's certainly not demanding that most of us know how to build a fire or organize a hunt for big game. Does his idea of "cognitively demanding" take in social interaction? For surely the strongest criticism of video games isn't that they're not difficult enough but rather that kids play the games rather than playing with each other or with the rest of their family. Or they play the games instead of doing their homework. Of course one can say the same about reading or arithmetic or any number of activities that can potentially draw you away from human back and forth. And what you glean from TV and from video games can be used in social interaction, and watching TV and playing video games can be social interaction when you're doing it with others. But still, does he address these criticisms head on?

So, in what way is pop culture making our brains work harder than it formerly had? For instance, one can say that Pirates of the Caribbean demands way more knowledge of pirate story conventions, comic books, contemporary movies, or whatever, than Mutiny on the Bounty and Moonfleet had back in the day (is this even true? well let's say it's true). But what does it demand in the way of knowledge of human beings, and what does it have to give? I mean it barely has any human beings (the Johnny Depp character, maybe), much less any interesting relationships among them (compare to Mutiny on the Bounty, which was hardly subtle, but Gable, Tone, and Laughton surely displayed some interpersonal interaction, right?). I don't get why psychology doesn't count as "cognitive."

I suppose viewers of Pirates of the Caribbean can engage in interesting or boring interaction with each other (as can viewers of Bounty), and you can't necessarily read off the movie whether it's viewers use it in interesting or boring ways.

[koganbot]

it's viewers = its viewers

See! Movies are making me stupid.