Emily Ballou
DeSimone
AP Language
EBIGFY & AOTD
9 October 2015
Amusement Is Bad For You
So much of the day is spent looking at the bright screens of laptops and iPhones instead of the bright outdoors. People are literally “plugged in”, constantly having to charge their electronics to use again and again. Thirty years ago, Neil Postman argued that with TV, we are "amusing ourselves to death." More recently, in an Internet-age response to Postman, opposing author Steven Johnson argues that "everything bad is good for you," including video games, television, Internet, and film. Postman is the one correct with his assertion: that television has negatively affected the level of public discourse in contemporary America.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death,…show more content… TV trains viewers to ignore context. In the end, they are less able to connect context with content at all. In opposition, Johnson states that “everything bad is good for you.” He builds his argument by looking at video games, TV, the Internet, and film. His argument deals almost entirely with the contents though, and not the medium at all. Seemingly opposing, Johnson offers legitimate arguments about how these cultural products could be making us smarter; his arguments work to actually support Postman’s observations more than undermine them, even though he juxtaposes himself with Postman. Johnson's main point is on the increasing complexity of video games, TV, movies, and the Internet. They require more deft thinking by players, viewers, and users. Johnson's claims are simply electric media's propensity toward meaninglessness, where content and context are obliterated. Complexification is not the result of increasing intelligence, but the requirement of increasing media unintelligibility. Whatever intelligence Johnson identifies is actually humanity's relentless drive for meaning, nothing else.
Increasing intelligence says less about media complexity and more about the drive to make meaning out of chaos and confusion. In this, Johnson is right: Participation happens when the audience is required to "fill in" information to make the plot make sense. Postman argued this same concept, that TV removes content from context, creating incoherence and making sequences incomplete. This exactly what Johnson is describing, is it not? Non-linear storylines and reversed sequences of events? This is the message of conforming to its