Rode my bike to work this morning, I highly recommend this mode of travel. What a way to wake up in the morning! Even after sleeping on an air mattress. Yup.
Last night we babysat for John’s niece, she’s roughly two and a half, and she is adorable. She’s extremely happy and very cute and just a little love of a girl. I won’t go into the details of the look of horror and exhaustion on our faces as we raced around the yard with her and the dog, what I do want to talk about is watching her watching “Little Bear” on TV.
She stared at it, hardcore, laughed here and there, but she was completely enthralled. I would turn and look at her watching and she wasn’t even close to seeing me watch her, she was way too involved.
At first, it scared me! She really was “zombied” out watching TV. “Oh my” I thought, “this is how it starts, this is how you become like me”. Until this morning on the train when I continued to read “Everything Bad is Good for You” by Steven Johnson.
Johnson writes about how our society is not becoming “dumbed down” by television, video games and movies, but rather how each one of those mediums is becoming ever more complicated, requiring deeper and more intelligent thought to process.
Yes, this even includes reality television. Thank God. I knew I wasn’t dumbing down America.
He attributes great emotional intelligence to reality television; we’re not watching to see people humiliate themselves, but are instead watching to read emotional cues, something we are hardwired to do. A skill required for work, love, and life. We are watching to see honest-to-god emotions, while we keep track of multiple relationships, multiple facial and body language clues to parse together connections.
He says not to be horrified by watching a child stare at the television set watching her programs, the child is not “zombied”, but “focused”. In a regular household how much diversity is going on? What was there yesterday is there today most likely, the goings on on the television screen are the most stimulation the child is receiving. The child is processing tons of information and making connections at a rapid fire pace.
He argues television is much more complicated today, as we supposedly stare mindlessly at the TV, we are actively using our brains. He uses 24 as a good example….20 years ago we would not have been able to watch 24, there is no way we could parcel out the bits of information we are receiving and NOT receiving, to make connections to the bigger picture.
TV makes money in syndication now, that’s where the fortune is. Television must be smarter and more complicated to make money from re-runs. Shows like The Simpsons and Seinfeld get better on multiple viewings, as we glean and enjoy even more information on the 5th or 6th times watching. This makes the television studios more money, therefore, they make smarter and more complicated shows.
It’s all very fascinating to me, he obviously goes into a lot more than what I have explained here. He doesn’t say that reality TV is the best thing in the world, but he does argue that it is doing the opposite of “dumbing down” and is actually making us smarter.
Take that you holier-than-thou hipsters! Maybe Gordon Ramsey really can teach you all a thing or two.
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