Improving the Media and Mind

Media has a way of making your mind think, and a way of making you involve your mind in new behaviors. In Everything Bad Is Good for You, by Steven Johnson, he explains “The Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today” (12). I do believe that his theory of the Sleeper Curve has a lot of true information. As you engage in different media you learn and absorb all sorts of information. If you engage in anything to long, for example watching television for hours at a time, there’re has to be some things that are not good for you.

Many of the theories that Johnson uses to show us how media makes us think, proves themselves as you engage in watching a show or playing a game. For English class we had to watch a serious, and see if it would prove or disprove Johnson’s theory of the Sleeper Curve. I choose to watch the show Weeds that came on Showtime, and it did go both ways to prove and disprove his theory. Some of the things in the show were really predictable. Just watching and knowing in your mind what was going to happen, made the show not as interesting. It did not let your mind work as much as Johnson thought the shows needed too. Although Johnson believes “flashing arrows reduce the amount of analytic work you need to make sense of a story.” (74) I could not catch the flashing arrows in the show to make it that predictable, but however I could guess on what was going to happen a lot.

Even when you think about all the other types of media besides television, they make your mind think about all sorts of stuff. When you learn to get on the internet or just how to get around on the computer your mind develops a whole bunch of new task. You have to know what you’re doing, in order to get something done. Johnson explains, “The process of acclimating to the new reality of networked communications has had a salutary effect on our minds” (116). Even video games you have to learn to complete challenges, and even how to set the whole thing up.

So the sleeper curve does make your mind work and wonder. There still has to be other factors that contribute to what makes us smarter. He barley talks about the school or how much people are starting to improve in teaching. Then a lot of other things probably work their ways into your mind, but his theory does hold true for most of the things. It does have to make you think a little bit more than people think it does. Media should be looked at a little more closely, to see how smart it does make people on an individual not, because media does keep improving.


Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad Is Good For You. New York: Riverhead Books, 2005.