Steven Johnson: “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.”
Later Johnson talks about the slasher parody Student Bodies and how a typical TV plot device involves a major character explaining what went wrong or what's going wrong or why it's going wrong. (See also: What are you, the narrator?) Johnson says that this plot device, in shows that are supposed to be making you smarter, are left out, so that you, the viewer, have to either remember scenes immediately previous, or at the beginning of the show, to understand the context of what just happened. In other words, they rely on people to remember and then make connections to things.
But isn't that what already-smart people do? The West Wing, The Simpsons, Family Guy, King of the Hill, 24, Arrested Development, all those shows appealed to me because they rewarded my already-existing knowledge and my already-existing appreciation of nuance and complexity. The shows don't make you a better politician, a better pop-culture-referencer, a more skilled anti-terrorist agent, or company president/head of a family than you already are: TV asks you to suspend belief for a half-hour or hour at a time. (Sports ask you to suspend belief for about 2 1/2 hours; politics asks you to suspend belief for weeks at a time.) All TV demands of you is that you sit on a couch for a specified period of time and maybe talk about it for a few minutes at work the next day. Except possibly for shows that give you information that you don't already know (for me, that's nature shows), or propose arguments that are innovative or compelling, the vast majority of TV is entertainment, not education. Education requires you to quietly reflect on what you've seen or heard in relation to other things; education requires you to actually produce something of intellectual value (an essay, a presentation, a conversation): all TV requires of you is that you give it your full attention and then move on to the next half-hour or hour-long block.
I agree with you. Also, you still derive mental arousement from seeing any kind of story being played out. If you're constantly keeping an eye out for character relationships and guessing what's going to happen next and keeping track of clues and what not, then you are using your brain to a much higher degree than watching something very basic, like reality TV.
Mental arousal is different from becomming smarter, though. I get mental arousal from watching the shows I list, but they don't make me smarter in any way. (Well, except for the times when they give me new information or make me look something up.) They're entertainment, not education: the shows themselves are smarter, but that doesn't make the people who watch them smarter. Actually, it's the other way around: smart people watch smart show. Smart shows do not create smart people.
So I disagree with almost everything in Johnson's article, except perhaps the short bit at the end where he talks about people going on to the web, interacting, dissecting the plots, etc. and even better, those who create 'fan fiction'. There are some really interesting fan interpretations of how the character should act or the situations they might find themselves in, and in this sense, because they're applying their brain in the creation of something, rather than merely consuming, they are becoming smarter. I just don't believe that the TV shows themselves or TV in general makes you smarter. TV shows and TV in general make you dumber, if all you do is sit on the couch and watch it.
I'll have to disagree with you. Smart shows do create smart people just as much as smart people watch smart shows. It's two-way, not one-way. If you were even more educated than you are now but had not watched a single minute of TV in your life, you would not be able to make sense of the really smart shows like Veronica Mars or Lost like you can now. Johnson's argument is that TV shows keep getting smarter because earlier shows have already educated viewers on certain patterns and tropes, and so a feedback cycle between smarter viewers and smarter shows is started. Anything done with any sort of intensity leaves a mark, so I can't believe that having mental arousal from TV doesn't leave you smarter in any way. If I spent 10 years only watching someone play a game, I would definitely be smarter in the mental areas that the game exercised as much as my physical capacity to be smarter in that mental area would allow. Your rant against the passivity of TV watching seems a little facile: I would in fact argue that most of our education anyway is unconscious grasping of patterns; wisdom is the conscious expression of this education. I also would like to deconstruct your last sentence, which I find a little extreme. The TV makes it easier to be passive than a book because you can let the images wash over you without interpretation much easier than a book's words, but you have to be the one to decide to be passive. As Johnson points out, if you are struggling to interpret the TV show, then you can hardly be passive.
I agree with (at least) the basic gist of what platocave said. To add to that, it seems like you're conflating "education" with "smart." Maybe Johnson is, too. But knowing a string of facts or being able to reproduce information on cue is not the same as being able to analyze and interpret sophisticated modes of delivery. e.g., that kid in high school who was salutatorian, but always had to work three times harder to get the A's, while other people sauntered into class having barely skimmed and just had an aptitude for objective tests, or for essay writing, etc. Which one is "smarter"? In many ways, the person with natural abilities, or people who resonate with patterns, structures, and modes of delivery ARE smarter than people who crack the books and spit out the facts; they're just not as well-informed.
I make the conflation a little more explicit in a follow-up post, but I try to distinguish between education and becoming smart in the last paragraph (by pointing out that Gladwell directly and Doc Searls indirectly address what Johnson talk about in terms of education, where I don't get the sense that Johnson really talks about education). Gladwell also addresses book learning—and cleverly dismisses Johnson's claims about it—and I try to address it as well in my follow-up. Basically, it's not through reading books and watching TV that the best kind of learning happens. It happens through making connections and arguments and evaluations about what we see and read, not from just consuming the media.
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