At first I found it appealing when Steven Johnson says in the introduction that he is not going to take a symbolic approach at the cultural objects, like what most cultural studies do--to establish a symbolic relationship between the work and some spirit of the age. He suggests that the cultural object is not a metaphor for the system, but more like an output or a result, and he would try to systemically diagram the competing forces rather than to decode them. (10) I thought he might be able to come up with a method of cultural studies that can go beyond that sort of ‘symptomatic interpretation’, which oftentimes neglects the specificity of cultural objects and reaches a reading that they are all expressions of the social configuration.

But I was disappointed when I saw the string Johnson uses to thread all the different media is just "the cognitive benefit". And this benefit of popular culture is being analyzed as an isolated process. While "cognition" refers to "a faculty for the processing of information", the question of what kind of information is being processed is more crucial. Ideologized information or ture information to the real world? Johnson uses "man-made weather system" as an analogy to demonstrate what he thinks of culture--it serves as a metaphor for his approach in return--the cognitive complexity only reflects higher level of self-recreation: there is no man-made weather system in real.

In justifying the popular culture, this approach focuses too much on the neurological appetites of the brain, but not the economical aspect of the culture industry, as he promised. He might want to remind people who are there creating these order and meaning that our increasingly stronger cognitive muscles are responding to?