Loose thoughts:

- Well, looks like maybe I won't need to write that book after all. Steven Johnson, who wrote Emergence, descibes his new book, Everything Bad Is Good For You: Why Today's Pop Culture Is Making Our Kids Smarter thusly:

Everything Bad is a pure work of persuasion, an old-fashioned
polemic...It's just me trying to marshal all the evidence I can to persuade the
reader of a single long-term trend: that popular culture on average has been
steadily growing more complex and cognitively challenging over the past thirty
years. The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it
completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts.

Of course, then again, maybe this'll provide some actual, uh, evidence for the thing I'm trying to argue. Science is good:

The critical method I've concocted for making the argument is one of my favorite
things about the book -- it draws a little on narratology, a little on brain
science, a little economics and media criticism, a dash of social network
theory. But it tries to yoke all those disciplines together in a consistent and
unified way.

I like Steven's stuff a lot; Emergence was very good, and I learned about that via the good ol' days of Plastic. So I'm very much looking forward to this. [via bb]

- The results of Popjustice's make-your-own-Britney-album-cover contest are kind of horrifying.

- Clifford Pub is the site for the various compilations done by members of the Severed Heads list. I've got a song on the Mangled compilation, track 13, Lew et al - Mine Sweet Child (pts 1 + 2), which you may or may not be interested in hearing. It's a ukelele, samples and analogue electronics-based cover of a Guns 'n' Roses tune. Bit of a trifle. But poke around on there, all that stuff is choice.

posted by Mike B. at 11:12 AM 0 comments