One of my friends once told me that everyone draws the line at himself (or herself). I was thinking of that as I looked at Steven Johnson's recommendations for popular culture that makes you smarter. I haven't yet read his newest book, Everything Bad Is Good for You, but I probably will. I like his writing and enjoy his take on technology. Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that today's popular culture is actually good for everyone. After all Johnson admits to having once been interested in quite a lot of no longer popular culture, like Victorian novels. With his breadth of education and interests, not to mention native intelligence, popular culture gets filtered and mediated and absorbed differently than it does for the average teen or pre-teen.
Having made that fairly obvious observation, I'm not sure where it leaves me or us, those of us who will be alive the see the coming cultural transformation. Will we abandon paper? Will we ever have truly interactive television or movies? Will any of us live long enough to get our own Holodeck installed in our basements or entertainment rooms? Or will we look back fondly on a time when we used to sit alone for hours silently reading a good book?
I spend a lot of time these days reading (and writing) online. But I still think of myself as someone who was formed by books. And I can't really imagine what it would be like to live in a world where most of us are formed by other media. I guess we all tend to draw the line at ourselves.
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