Watching Tv Makes You Smarter -Steven Johnson Essay

Words: 4829
Pages: 20
Open Document
Watching TV Makes You Smarter

By STEVEN JOHNSON

The Sleeper Curve

SCIENTIST A: Has he asked for anything special?
SCIENTIST B: Yes, this morning for breakfast . . . he requested something called ''wheat germ, organic honey and tiger's milk.''
SCIENTIST A: Oh, yes. Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties.
SCIENTIST B: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or . . . hot fudge?
SCIENTIST A: Those were thought to be unhealthy. — From Woody Allen's ''Sleeper''

n Jan. 24, the Fox network showed an episode of its hit drama ''24,'' the real-time thriller known for its cliffhanger tension and often- gruesome violence. Over the preceding weeks, a number …show more content…
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, flashing arrows and social networks.

According to television lore, the age of multiple threads began with the arrival in 1981 of ''Hill Street Blues,'' the Steven Bochco police drama invariably praised for its ''gritty realism.'' Watch an episode of ''Hill Street Blues'' side by side with any major drama from the preceding decades -- ''Starsky and Hutch,'' for instance, or ''Dragnet'' -- and the structural transformation will jump out at you. The earlier shows follow one or two lead characters, adhere to a single dominant plot and reach a decisive conclusion at the end of the episode. Draw an outline of the narrative threads in almost every ''Dragnet'' episode, and it will be a single line: from the initial crime scene, through the investigation, to the eventual cracking of the case. A typical ''Starsky and Hutch'' episode offers only the slightest variation on this linear formula: the introduction of a comic subplot that usually appears only at the tail ends of the episode, creating a structure that looks like this graph. The vertical axis represents the number of individual threads, and the horizontal axis is time.

A ''Hill Street Blues'' episode
Show More

Related Documents: Watching Tv Makes You Smarter -Steven Johnson Essay

Rhetorical Analysis Of Watching TV Make You Smarter, By Steven Johnson

On a normal day, humans watch many hours of TV. During a week humans spend most hours watching a visual image and hearing the sounds that are reproduced on screen. Parents would think that their kids are watching TV too much, television doesn’t stimulate your brain, they might say. In the article Watching TV Make You Smarter by Steven Johnson, he gives the ways that watching television can mentally stimulate the mind to think in new ways. There are many shows that require thinking due to analyzing…

Words 788 - Pages 4

Television: An Educational Tool Or Simply An Escape From Society?

Society? “If you sit that close to the television you’ll go blind.” This is a statement I’m sure many people have heard at least once in their lifetime. Since the 1950’s, television has been a huge part of American culture, and now you see them everywhere. With so many televisions within easy access, the least we can hope for as a society is that they are doing some kind of good. This is the argument that Steven Johnson makes in his article “Watching TV Makes You Smarter.” Johnson argues the point…

Words 756 - Pages 4

Bad Is Bad, Period. Essay

Bad is Bad, Period. Steven Johnson’s book, Everything Bad is Good For You, attempts to convince the reader that although the current state of the world is that of media bombardment, we are becoming smarter and deeper thinkers due to the hectic nature of our society. Johnson argues that United States has seen a steady increase in IQ over the past 75 years and that this steady rise is thanks to popular culture. Whether it is though dedicated attention to television or movies, prolonged concentration…

Words 1623 - Pages 7

Summary And Response

Summary & Response: Watching TV Makes you Smarter In the late 1900s, the branching of television's arised in our American homes. At least ninety eight percent of the United States homes had at least one set of television. Since then, many dispute whether or not watching television has a negative or positive impact in our life. “Watching TV makes you smarter” written by Steven Johnson provides various ideas about the intake of the television. The article begins with a gruesome episode of Fox’s…

Words 321 - Pages 2

Everything Bad Is Good for You (Essay)

The Innovation of Educational Tools Playing video games and watching TV shows are beneficial types of popular culture. Conventional wisdom would argue that new media is a bad influence and that the only way to be intelligent is by reading. In the book Everything Bad is Good For You, author Steven Johnson, argues that even though our popular culture seems to get dumber, it is actually getting smarter. Johnson proves his arguments by comparing and explaining the benefits of the complexity of modern…

Words 1658 - Pages 7

Everything Bad Is Good For You Analysis

that nobody uses their brain anymore while watching TV and using Internet. On the other hand, Steven Johnson, one of the most provocative American popular-media theorist and writer in the field of Internet and electronic devices in general, puts forward a radical alternative to this endless complaints about the damage produced by the new media products in terms of loss of thinking and violence shown even to children. In his book Everything Bad is Good for You he draws a line between the structure and…

Words 445 - Pages 2

englsih paper

Brown English 101-06 16 September 2013 Television: Hurting or Helping? As I sit here and watch “The Office” between my classes, I think about an essay I read in English class the week before: “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” by Steven Johnson. He writes in his essay how today’s television is making us smarter by using complex plot lines. While there are a few intellectually challenging shows aired on television today that one could strongly argue are beneficial to our intelligence, we still have the…

Words 1767 - Pages 8

Essay On Family Guy Is Smart

whether a viewer’s intelligence is benefiting from television shows. Steven Johnson, in his article, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” argues that television has nutritional value. He believes that the cognitive ability of viewers has increased over years as television shows combined multiple story lines into single episodes. In Antonia Peacocke’s article, “Family Guy and Freud: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious,” she makes a similar point. While she describes the goal that the writers of Family…

Words 597 - Pages 3

Essay about Is the Media Taking Over

strengthen our grasp on how the media influences us. Modern day television has come to require much cognitive processes as it becomes something of importance to viewers across the nation (Johnston 278). In opinionated articles such as Watching TV Makes You Smarter by Steven Johnston, Family Guy and Freud: Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious by Antonia Peacocke, and The Good, the Bad, and The Daily Show by Jason Zinser, it is revealed that the mandatory standard of comprehension to interpret our…

Words 1227 - Pages 5