90 Days of ILP

Just started reading Stephen Berlin Johnson's fascinating Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today's Popular Culture is Actually Good For Us, a book that has Coolmel written all over it. Similarly to the latter's thesis that blogging is a spiritual practice, Johnson presents a fascinating analysis of what he calls the "Sleeper Curve", the general tendency of increased complexity found in the mediated displays of today's pop, especially in video games and TV.

Video games, for instance, train not only hand/eye coordination, but skills in probing environments, discerning patterns, problem-solving, and much more. Though violent shooters like Doom may have dominated the headlines, the best-selling games are "God" games like Rise of Nations and others which actually foster cognitive development. TV as well has undergone something of an evolution through the use of multiple plot-threading, as seen by the increased popularity of densely-woven dramas like The West Wing and post-Malcolm in the Middle sitcoms like the amazing Arrested Development. Even puerile reality shows can be sources of cognitive enrichment if you ignore the content and look at the structure: what else are Survivor or The Apprentice but a chance to exercise one's emotional intelligence and ability to track the myriad relationships of a social network?

Where this is leading: though only a brief mention in the book, since the publication of Everything Bad there's been increased interest in what Johnson calls the the "media diet": the deliberate use of TV and video games (along with reading, the internet, film, music) to exercise various functions of the mind so as to better adapt to today's info-saturated realities. Sound like creepy apologetics for something we often suspect to be the enemy of the heightened consciousness and increased care/compassion we hope to get from ILP? Or a supplement to it?

Read Coolmel's description of the effect blogging has had on his awareness, and decide for yourself:

I can easily recall stuff I read and blogged about years ago. I could connect the dots more clearly and understand their meaning. Some of the stuff I blogged might seem gibberish to the casual readers, but they all make sense to me. If I imagine what my brain looks like at the time of this writing, I can see neurons firing and going non-stop hyperlinking. And it doesn't stop there.