Everything Bad Is Good For You Analysis

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Popular culture (or pop-culture) could be defined as “cultural activities or commercial products reflecting, suited to, or aimed at the tastes of the general masses of people” . Raymond Williams (Keyword, 1983) defined it as the general process of intellectual, spirit and aesthetic developments of a particular society at a particular time, like an intellectual and especially artistic significance. A large number of researchers advocate the “mindlessness of mass culture” against the new media products, claiming that nobody uses their brain anymore while watching TV and using Internet.
On the other hand, Steven Johnson, one of the most provocative American popular-media theorist and writer in the field of Internet and electronic devices in general, puts forward a radical alternative to this endless complaints about the damage produced by the new media products in terms of loss of thinking and violence shown even to children. In his book Everything Bad is Good for You he draws a line between the structure and the content of pop culture, admitting the “negative messages” in the current media-sphere (content) but underlying the other side of the coin (structure):
Just as important – if not more important – is the kind of thinking you have to do to make sense of a cultural experience. That is where the Sleeper Curve becomes
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Moreover, he derives the concept of Sleeper Curve from the Woody Allen’s film Sleeper so as to draw a comparison between the “scientists from 2173 [who] are astounded that twentieth-century society failed to grasp the nutritional merits of cream pies and hot fudge” and the currently perception of popular culture as “locked in a spiral drive of deteriorating standards”. Pop culture, as explained with the concept of Sleeper Curve, is “getting more mentally challenging as the medium