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2005 non fiction book by Steven Johnson

Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter is a non fiction book written by Steven Johnson. Published in 2005, it details Johnson's theory that popular culture – in particular television programs and video games – has grown more complex and demanding over time and is making society as a whole more intelligent, contrary to the perception that modern electronic media are harmful or unconstructive. The book's claims, especially related to the proposed benefits of television, drew media attention. It received mixed critical reviews. Johnson states that he aims to persuade readers of "two things:
By almost all the standards we use to measure reading’s cognitive benefits — attention, memory, following threads, and so on — the nonliterary popular culture has been steadily growing more challenging over the past thirty years. Increasingly, the nonliterary popular culture is honing different mental skills that are just as important as the ones exercised by reading books."

Johnson challenges the precept that pop culture is deteriorating as a result of new media platforms. He derives the term Sleeper Curve from the Woody Allen film Sleeper, where "scientists from 2173 are astounded that twentieth century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge". He uses this to argue against contemporary perception of the deteriorating standards of pop culture, although Johnson is quick to point out that by no means does the Sleeper Curve imply that popular culture has become superior to traditional culture. In another, Walter Kirn, while acknowledging a lack of science and questioning some of the book's premises with regards to the benefits of reality TV, praised Johnson's "elegant polemic", concluding that "[c]onsidered purely on its own terms, Johnson's thesis holds up despite these quibbles." Wired gave the book an overall positive review, describing it as "chock full of interesting insights that are clearly the reflection of an agile and catholic intellect", but also suggested that the book is largely built around a straw man argument and thus "largely misses the point of the more valid critique of today's pop culture". The Guardian found part of Johnson's thesis — that some elements of pop culture have grown more complex — persuasive, but not the second claim that this greater complexity offers any tangible benefits for the public aside from preparing them to handle more complex pop culture; it criticized the shortage of hard science and the conclusions drawn from what science exists, as well as the application of literary theory to visual arts media. The Associated Press review praised the book overall as "an engaging read", although it noted that the book was uneven, with TV and video game discussions better than those on film and the internet, and repetitive in presenting its theme. Salon. com described it simply as "a fine contrarian defense of pop culture".