Business 3121 - Popular Culture

Popular Culture

In this developing world, technology has had a huge impact on people’s lives. When television are invented, people can see many things through a screen. There are more people than ever who like to watch TV. However, there are still many people argue about the function and impact of this kind of popular culture. In the article, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” Steven Johnson states that watching popular TV shows and playing popular video games help people to improve their intelligence. On the other hand, Dana Stevens has different idea as Johnson. In her article, “Thinking Outside the Idiot Box,” she claims that watching TV does not necessarily make people smarter.  In my opinion, watching TV and other genres of popular entertainment helps people increase their intelligence, especially video games.

In Johnson’s article, he mentioned that complicated characters and scenario development help the audiences to think more with “Intellectual Labor” (Johnson), which is talking about people's mind are following the story line. He stated that “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” (Johnson). In short, Johnson believes that reality TV shows make people aware about what happened in real life and complex story lines to help people think more. Similarly, playing video games can help improve people’s attention and their ability to multitask. For example, League of Legends is a game that requires the player to have good multitasking skills and focus. When the player is playing the game, they need to use both hands to control their character’s directions and use skills. At the same time, they might also need to communicate with their team-mates. Therefore, video games can be a good tool for people to improve their intelligence by teaching people to multitasking and focusing.

Stevens disagreed with Johnson that watching more TV will make people addicted to it, and she believes that watching television is only a kind of entertainment. It will not make people smart or dumb, so she does not think watching television is good. Stevens suggests that “Today being the first day of this year’s TV Turnoff Week, there are a lot of articles out there about what Lisa Simpson would call the “endumbening” effect of television viewing” (Stevens). In other words, she likes the idea of TV Turnoff Week and believes people should be playing outside, reading, studying, and working instead of watching TV shows. In addition, Stevens disagreed with Johnson’s view that complex television story line will help people to think more relate to their life because she emphasizes that most of people do not think of lessons they have learned after watching a TV show. However, I disagree with Stevens and believe entertainments like television shows and video games help people to aware the world around them. For instance, many people think violent TV shows would bring negative impact to people, but the violent TV shows did help people to be aware of the consequence of acting violent, such as death and prison time. Also, video games help people communicate with each other. Watching TV and playing video games will make people aware of the world around them.