What Comes Next?

Finally, I finished “Everything Bad Is Good For You”. Johnson has a very interesting way of looking at our pop cultures new tools and habits, that even though most are frowned upon, he has the courage to defend them. Now, I can convince my parents and my elders that watching TV is good for my cognitive development, and how smart and analytical my brother is getting by playing Grand Theft Auto.

Johnson’s different points surprises me about how good everything that we use these days can be. After reading the book, just as I concluded on my previous blog, I can see how innovative and creative the people of my era are being. Humanity is pushing humanity to be better, and having more tools. Yes, many can be useless to us, like a heating towel machine, but still it accommodates our way of living. People are forced to be creative, just think about how many different sized of an ipad exist. Its still the same ipad, just with some different features, mostly physical. People always want new and different things.

When I finished the book I reflected on what I had said in my previous blog. I reflected upon how “innovative” my generation was. I started looking back into time and realized that maybe when humanity was more innovative was actually going back thousands and thousands and years ago to lets say, Ancient Greece. People started developing mathematical skills, architecture was unbelievable, and if we start going some years forward we arrive to the time where Cristobal Colon discovered that the world was round, people discovered and conquered new lands. Now that’s innovative. But does that necessarily mean that my generation is less impressive? Well no. All of the topography and basic knowledge has been discovered, but as Steve Jobs says it, “we focus on the details that are what really make the difference.” We are going into depth with the basic knowledge we find, and we are finding impressive things about the world that we live in.

I wonder what kind of things people are going to develop in the future. A prediction that I make is that years from now, humanity is going to know much more about space. At the moment we are like the Cristobal Colons of space. But I know that since science is evolving rapidly we will be able to get to know much more about our solar system and the universe. Also, there will be advances in medicine, that will make peoples lives better. Right now the sky’s the limit, even though many of us may think that we have reached our top, but the truth is we aren’t even close, and we probably will never be, because people want to keep on innovating.

I don’t know if this conclusion is what Johnson had in mind for his readers to conclude after reading the book, but its what Johsnon made me think. Of course, his arguments are very entertaining and bright, but I think a video game has more than just cognitive importance, it’s the effect it has on humanity to want to keep on discovering new games that pushes these game creators to come up with something better. Our generation isn’t one that is “dumbing down, its quite the opposite. The great-unsung story of our culture today is how many welcome trends are going up. We are innovative and creative, not “innate slackers.” (199)

Visual Vocabulary:

Innate: inborn; natural.

Omission: someone or something that has been left out or excluded.