Analysis Of Watching Tv Makes You Smarter David Johnson
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Viewing Intellectualism
Within the two articles “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” by Steven Johnson and “Thinking Outside the Idiot Box” by Dana Stevens, it is conversed as to whether watching television can either improve a person’s intellectualism, or strongly impair it. Stevens responds to Johnson’s article showing controversial viewpoints that explain how watching television cannot make it’s viewers necessarily any smarter, just more adapted to all of the fake realities and advertisements that continue to exist. Johnson describes how a counterargument is always described by others who are not as influenced by television, in which “What media has lost in moral clarity, they have gained in realism” (Johnson 279). Even though Steven Johnson…show more content… Johnson published this in 2005 and the passage from it, Watching TV Makes You Smarter, was published in the New York Times Magazine in 2005, consequently. This only charged the debate further and shocked society. The debate had been focused on whether or not viewing TV makes less intelligent or if it simply does nothing to broaden our intelligence. Within this, Johnson asserts that watching television is capable of making society smarter. “I think there is another way to assess the social virtue of pop culture, one that looks at media as kind of a cognitive workout, not a series of life lessons” (Johnson 279). He further discusses how today’s media has a larger amount of negative messages within society although he conventionally believes that viewing television needs that sort of bad influence. Johnson speaks of televised intelligence in which is comprised of attention, patience, retention, and the parsing of narrative threads. He believes that these traits all come out of viewing certain television shows and can be more so of a benefit than what Stevens later refers to as a poor representation of