A couple of bloggers I read (Steven Krause and Jeff Rice and probably more) have been talking about Steven Johnson’s article,
“Watching TV Make You Smarter” , so I whipped it out and read it this morning. It is quite provocative, and addresses some important issues. I say that not only because my dissertation addresses the exact same topics, namely spectatorship in the age of new media, with windowed interfaces, video games, multiple narrative threads, and more!, but also because he draws on a variety of TV shows in different genres for evidence. His basic argument is that TV now, including shows like the Sopranos, ER and 24, is much more narratively complex and subtle than TV of previous decades, like Dragnet, or Dallas. He also talks about reality shows in relation to game shows like The Newlywed Game, making the point that reality shows rely on and enhance our strengths of awareness of social situations. Interestingly, he doesn’t do a comparison of the comedy genre, although he does mention The Mary Tyler Moore Show and others.
Up to this point he makes a wonderfully subtle and well-supported case for the complexity, subtlety and simultaneity of today’s TV, parsing the material to illustrate precisely what gets left unsaid, how viewers are left confused about the present instead of the future, that narrative markers are more obscure or absent, that these factors lead to increased value in re-viewing. But he fails to make the explicit connection that the title indicates, that TV makes you smarter. I argue in the early draft of my dissertation that viewers today are more active, that spectatorship in film, tv and other moving image technologies is more complex than it was, but I hesitate to make a simple cause-and-effect connection between the media and how we think.To describe a difference in spectatorship and to imply cause and effect are very different things, the latter getting close to falling into the same trap that anti-violence crusaders fall into, namely, asserting that violence onscreen causes violent behavior, on which the jury is still out. While I agree that modern television shows, as well as movies, demand a different type fo cognitive activity, I would stop short of recommending that parents let their kids watch whatever they want, so long as it is complex.
I am, however, willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that he does better explain this connection in his forthcoming book, which I intend to read. At this point I will happily concede a correlation (I had better, as it is the crux of my diss), but I will wait for more evidence for a more causal relation.
