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TV makes us smarter

9 comments on TV makes us smarter

TV makes us smarter

: Steven Johnson is working on a book I can’t wait to read (and will soon) because it echoes a screed I’ve been shouting for years: TV and popular culture are the best proof of our taste and intelligence. For the first time, he writes about what he’s writing here.

It’s just me trying to marshal all the evidence I can to persuade the reader of a single long-term trend: that popular culture on average has been steadily growing more complex and cognitively challenging over the past thirty years. The dumbing-down, instant gratification society assumption has it completely wrong. Popular entertainment is making us smarter and more engaged, not catering to our base instincts.

9 responses to “TV makes us smarter”

  1. Cridand Avatar
    Cridand

    A few years ago I saw an episode of Candid Camera from teh mid-60’s, the early color years. The audience was mostly deeply senior. When looking over this audience, so outrageously amused by Mr. Funt’s antics, it was amazing to think this was the generation that had defeated the Germans (in some cases, twice).

  2. Mike G Avatar
    Mike G

    I think this is utter nonsense. Pop culture on average? Pop culture on average is meaningless because pop culture is not homogenous. The best of pop culture is significantly better than it used to be. Law and Order is smarter than Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law. ER is smarter than Medical Center. The Simpsons is smarter than All in the Family. (Though nothing’s funnier than Sgt Bilko, even now; and there are certainly things we used to have then that have vanished now, try to think of something comparable to Leonard Bernstein’s Young People’s Concerts today.) But the reason for all that is that the audience has split into two groups and one is educated and upscale. So there’s “trade paperback” TV now, in a way there wasn’t 20 years ago.
    The other, on the other hand, is much worse than it used to be. Not just that it’s cruder, although it certainly is (but you can be crude and smart, see South Park), but it’s baser. There was nothing smart about, say, Mike Douglas or Tattletales but Jackass, Maury Povich, rap videos are dumber yet because they’re aiming straight at the gonads, at the most basic forms of self-gratification. That shit’s bread and circuses.
    As some guy said, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times, yo bitch.

  3. Gunny Avatar
    Gunny

    Dear Jeff,
    Am wishing to read this offering as well, and eagerly awaiting Book #2 in the series, tentatively titled “How drinking shot after shot of Tequila and doing several lines makes driving a sports car safer.”
    Your pal,
    Gunny

  4. Michael Avatar
    Michael

    If TV is making us smarter, Johnson should produce a sitcom with his message, not write a book.

  5. Michael Avatar
    Michael

    I’ll be interested in reading this. I’m not sure how the argument can be made that just becuase the plot of Friends or The Sopranos is complex necessarily makes me smarter for watching it. That presumes (1) you can somehow measure “complexity” in a media text, (2) that I am able to follow these complex plots, and (3) that these complex plots are all meant for me to follow.
    Explaining (3) further, often the complexity and polysemy of television plots is intended to allow a wide range of diverse people to be able to relate & enjoy the plot (thus delivering a larger audience to the advertisers). It might not be the case that the complex plot is all meant for me (or the average viewer) to fully unravel.

  6. Karl Avatar
    Karl

    I think Mike G hits it. I would add that — even if you toss out the consensus dross and stuff intended to celebrate that which is base in human nature (e.g., Jackass, certain strains of hip-hop) — arguing popular culture has gotten better over the past 30 years strikes me as pretty modest claim. I wonder: would Dickens have qualified as popular culture in his time?

  7. Richard Aubrey Avatar
    Richard Aubrey

    My parents graduated from U-Conn in 1943, a bad time to be a healthy male college grad.
    My father got a call from the U a couple of years ago to help with an oral history of the Huskies.
    The girl wanted to know what was going on on campus that there were so few guys there during the early Forties.
    My dad explained WW II to her. He wasn’t sure she actually got the connection.
    The up side was that when I was explaining this to a bunch at the office, one of our summer help, a high school grad, caught on.
    I don’t think worrying about whether various shows are smarter (which is to say more complicated and which show people doing non-average people stuff) is all that important.
    Johnny Carson used to do topical monologues until the audiences quit getting it. Then he went to stump the band.
    Jay Leno does infinitely more simplistic schtick, because he has to.

  8. lindenen Avatar
    lindenen

    Yeah, I think Dickens was pop culture at the time. His works were serialized in the papers, but you have to wonder how many people were literate.
    In Tocqueville’s Democracy In America, he comments at how amazed he was to find that Americans were quite possibly some of the most well-educated people in the world. So sad. Something has been stolen from us.

  9. Richard Aubrey Avatar
    Richard Aubrey

    I think we mistake Euro culture when we look at their high culture and compare it to, say, prime time television.
    Many, many years ago, there was a short-lived series of European variety shows on television. They usually ended with two grown men screaming and smacking each other with rubber chickens.
    Benny Hill, whom I absolutely loved when he was on our television late at night and I was too tired to think grand thoughts, was Brit pop culture. Audience shots showed grown folks, men in coat and tie, enjoying the show immensely.
    In Spain a couple of times in the last few years, I checked the posters on kiosks and walls for the next shows in town. Techno. Other stuff I couldn’t understand.
    Watch Don Francisco on Univision.
    We do okay.
    But we used to do better.