TV Makes Us Smarter?
Interesting article in NYT Magazine this morning. It's an excerpt from Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter by Steven Johnson. Johnson claims that TV today is making us smarter because its programs make us think. Link. Excerpts:
For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ''masses'' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''24,'' you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ''24,'' you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion -- video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms -- turn out to be nutritional after all.
I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as a kind of cognitive workout, not as a series of life lessons. There may indeed be more ''negative messages'' in the mediasphere today. But that's not the only way to evaluate whether our television shows or video games are having a positive impact. Just as important -- if not more important -- is the kind of thinking you have to do to make sense of a cultural experience. That is where the Sleeper Curve becomes visible.
Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading [plots and sub-plots and narratives], [the decreasing use of what the industry calls] flashing arrows [to tell the audience what is going on] and social networks [that force your brain to figure out the relationship among characters].
In pointing out some of the ways that popular culture has improved our minds, I am not arguing that parents should stop paying attention to the way their children amuse themselves. What I am arguing for is a change in the criteria we use to determine what really is cognitive junk food and what is genuinely nourishing. Instead of a show's violent or tawdry content, instead of wardrobe malfunctions or the F-word, the true test should be whether a given show engages or sedates the mind. Is it a single thread strung together with predictable punch lines every 30 seconds? Or does it map a complex social network? Is your on-screen character running around shooting everything in sight, or is she trying to solve problems and manage resources? If your kids want to watch reality TV, encourage them to watch ''Survivor'' over ''Fear Factor.'' If they want to watch a mystery show, encourage ''24'' over ''Law and Order.'' If they want to play a violent game, encourage Grand Theft Auto over Quake. Indeed, it might be just as helpful to have a rating system that used mental labor and not obscenity and violence as its classification scheme for the world of mass culture.
All right, analysis time.
First off, this article does not claim that contemporary TV programming makes us smarter. It's saying that TV makes us smarter than did 1970s TV programming. Until Hill Street Blues, TV shows had one main character and one plot. By the time we got to The Sopranos, we could see up to 20 threads, and 20 is more difficult to track than one.
It's believable. TV today is more cognitively challenging than TV from the days of Tony Orlando and Dawn.
But does today's programming make us smarter than reading, which is arguably its arch-enemy? TV is a medium that induces passivity and intellectual laziness. Just because it induces less laziness than it did thirty years ago doesn't make it intellectually rigorous any more than the fat guy who used to eat four greasy hamburgers is now eating well because he eats six hamburgers and a salad.
By making more-engaging fare, people are watching more TV than ever. Okay, so they're getting some salad with all the fat, but it's still a lot of fat and not nearly as good as alternative mind foods.
If you're not sure what to think about all this, try a simple experiment. Sit down and read a challenging book for an hour. Then sit down and watch a "challenging" TV show (The Sopranos, for instance). There won't be any comparison. We dig The Sopranos, but mentally speaking, it's not nearly as rigorous as reading. The show will hold your attention for you; a book, on the contrary, requires you to make all the effort. The show also doesn't throw the same volume of material at you; you could read a 50-minute Soprano script in a fraction of the time it takes to watch it.
As far as we can figure, a sophisticated TV show is like an elaborate exercise machine that does all the work. You just sit on the machine, and it moves all your body parts. Using such an exercise machine is better than nothing. It does, after all, keep our bodies moving. But that doesn't make it a great work out. In the same way, contemporary TV keeps our minds moving, but that doesn't make it a great mental work out.
