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TV is good for you. No, really.

9 comments on TV is good for you. No, really.

TV is good for you. No, really.

: Steven Johnson’s new book is about a subject dear to my heart: Everything Bad Is Good For You starts arguing in its subtitle: “How today’s popular culture is actually making us smarter.” An excerpt appears in this weekend’s New York Times Magazine. I got to read a version of the book a few months ago and it’s damned good.

In the book, Johnson says that TV — and other popular culture — is more complex than it used to be and challenges us to think; it makes us smarter. I’m not sure which way the cause-and-effect really works. I believe that popular culture is just now catching up to us and that is because all our tools of choice — remote control, cable box, TiVo — are forcing popular culture to chase us, to get as smart as we are. In any case, TV is getting smarter and both TV and we are smarter than conventional wisdom ever held.

Ever since I was a TV critic starting in the mid-’80s, I’ve argued that given a chance to watch good shows, we do; that the ratings prove Americans do have good taste; and that TV is only getting better. Steven turns it around and adds one more notch: TV makes us better.

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…..

… [Y]ou have to avoid the tendency to sentimentalize the past. When people talk about the golden age of television in the early 70’s — invoking shows like ”The Mary Tyler Moore Show” and ”All in the Family” — they forget to mention how awful most television programming was during much of that decade.

Ditto all the slathering over the other alleged Golden Age of the Vaudevillian ’50s. TV keeps getting better.

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.

It’s all about respect, really: The respect producers have for the audience in producing good shows; the respect commentators have for the public in recognizing that, contrary to popular wisdom, popular taste is good; the respect the audience has for itself.

9 responses to “TV is good for you. No, really.”

  1. Matthew Goggins Avatar
    Matthew Goggins

    Jeff,
    T.V. is great stuff. It’s educational, entertaining, relaxing, stimulating, and titillating.
    But it is also a seductively passive, even addictive medium. It’s all too easy to sit on one’s tookas for five or six hours because the T.V. set is catering to our need to avoid boredom.
    But it is much better to make the effort to get up and engage the world out there and do something constructive with our own actual lives.
    T.V. is great, but easily abused. We need to have a conscious desire to spend only a moderate period of time in front of the idiot box.
    The same could be said of computers and the internet too.

  2. Mike G Avatar
    Mike G

    I think it’s just made us all smartasses. Not the same thing.

  3. Eric Rice Avatar
    Eric Rice

    Thanks for pointing out the book, Jeff. This is a topic close to my heart as well, since I don’t reject popular culture, but instead envision healthy hybrids between Blogosphere Birkenstock Ideology and mass media in which all of us can be players in the game.

  4. Steven Johnson Avatar
    Steven Johnson

    Jeff, really interesting how you formulate the relationship of cause and effect: we’re already smart; it’s just that the platform finally allows the culture to acknowledge how smart we’ve been all along.
    I suspect that describes a lot of what I talk about in the book, but not all. I mean, you lived through this stuff: people really did complain that Hill Street was too complicated. Actual viewers, not just execs. And when I first tried to get my mother to use a mouse in 1988, she nearly fell off her chair, complaining that it was too awkward physically. (Now she freaks if she’s away from her PowerBook for more than an hour.) So I do think there’s a sense in which our brains have literally been trained to function better at these tasks: decode multithreaded narratives, say, or adapt to new computer interfaces, etc.
    I don’t ever quite say it in the book, but my suspicion is that the TV isn’t actively making us smarter; the real training is coming from the interactive media (games, blogs, email), and television has simply had to come up with more complex programming to satisfy that audience. (Which is basically a slightly modified version of what you said.) Someone who has played Halo 2 all the way to the end isn’t going to be happy watching Dallas. And so the TV folks had to create Lost, 24, Alias, Survivor, Sopranos, The Wire, etc. to keep that audience interested…

  5. zeppenwolf Avatar
    zeppenwolf

    Hmmm…
    I’ll take _I Love Lucy_ over _Friends_,
    I’ll take _Twilight Zone_ over _X Files_,
    I’ll take _Honeymooners_ over _Seinfeld_,
    I’ll take _Columbo_ (at least the good ones), over… well, over any of these newer detective shows.
    Ok, so maybe I’m old.

  6. Walter Guest Avatar
    Walter Guest

    I’m a little out of touch having lived in Bangkok this past year. But TV, except for the reality shows, is getting better. “Married With Children” and “3rd Rock From the Sun” were as good as anything from any era.
    It’s bound to get worse though. The censorship that our administration is going to lay on us will stifle creativity. In two years they probably won’t even allow reruns of those shows without heavy cutting.

  7. Brian Avatar
    Brian

    That has to be the most moronic claim I’ve ever read – TV makes us smarter, better, is good for you. What’s next catsup is really a vegetable?

  8. Anil Avatar
    Anil

    “That has to be the most moronic claim I’ve ever read – TV makes us smarter, better, is good for you. What’s next catsup is really a vegetable?”
    I think the problem, Brian, is that you didn’t read the article, and you certainly haven’t read the book.

  9. Jersey Exile Avatar
    Jersey Exile

    This kind of lapsarian bullshit has been around since the beginning of time. Television has never been better, because it’s a medium which voraciously feeds upon all other forms of culture (including past incarnations of itself), requiring more and more intellectual engagement on the part of its viewers. Even watching an episode of “The O.C.” and actually getting every single high/lo cultural reference takes as much brainpower as getting through a Shakespearean play!