TV is Smarter than You Think, No Smoke
According to Steven Johnson’s “Television Makes You Smarter,” judgement against the television industry for creating mind-numbing programs that dumb-down consumers as well as society receives a relevant challenge.
Johnson purports that television programming grows more sophisticated with time, “each passing year.” Rather than depleting society’s cognitive abilities, Johnson claims that new technologies and production techniques are “actually posing new cognitive challenges that are actually making our minds measurably sharper.”
According to Johnson, “as time passes, the median level of cognitive complexity provided by popular media is increasing.” Television has a way of delivering complexity in appetizing packages.
Take, for example, the animated television program “The Simpsons.” Surfacing in 1987 in a series of short animated sketches airing on “The Tracey Ullman Show,” the concept’s popularity led to the development of a half-hour prime time show. With 28 seasons under its belt, accolades for the show include: longest-running American sitcom, longest-running American animated program, and longest-running American scripted primetime television series.
What is more, the program is packed with cultural references. A favorite example is when Gerald Ford moves into Homer’s neighborhood and the two are shown slipping and tripping as they walk to get nachos.
President Ford had a history of slipping and tripping when serving as American’s Commander in Chief. This is just one example of how writer’s of television programming outwit critics, and ever so subtly.
In 1971, and as a result of Congress passing the Public Health Cigarette Smoking Act, cigarette advertising was banned from television and radio. This is indicative of the fact that by 1970 less than 50 years after the first demonstration of television by Philo T. Farnsworth in San Francisco, society had learned of its influential power. Since 1971, a television rating system and other mechanisms designed to control standards have surfaced.
Johnson’s “Sleeper Curve” theory is justification that television offers more than meets the eye. Television is an art form, and a sophisticated genre relatively young in its development, and evidently powerful and subject to enhancing with both time and technology. It is not going away, nor are the dollars supporting the industries behind it.
