The premises seems to be that TV shows are becoming more complex than the shows of the 70s. A show like The Brady Bunch won’t stimulate your mind because you can pretty much guess how every show ends, but a show like The Sopranos will give your mind a workout. Video games have also become more complex than the previously rigid Pac-man games. In Pac-man there is only one obvious way to victory, but in a game like GTA San Andreas the solution is more complex and you can go about it in different ways.
While I still think that VH1 and MTV destroy brain cells more effectively than crack, this guy may have a point. What do you think?
The TV analogy sucks - the Sopranos do not in any way fill the same niche in TV today as the Brady Bunch did back then. You can surely guess the ending of, say, an episode of Everybody Loves Raymond, can’t you? And today’s popular books probably can’t be said to be any more or less complex than the popular books of days of yore.
I thought he had some good points as well. It’s impossible to deny that there’s more information out there than ever, and as such your average person knows more things.
Most TV shows are as formulaic as ever. I used to have a habit of watching sitcoms and telling my brothers the punchlines before they were said. A better way to explain the author’s point would be to say - I think this is an exact quote - “TV is harder.” Pop culture is more self-referential than ever, and as such you need to know more things in order to understand the jokes, even some of the dumb jokes on bad shows. That doesn’t mean it’s making people smarter, exactly, but it means they have to know more things. You do have to have more things within easy grasp of your mind.
I skimmed parts of the book in borders and it seems like the guy does some serious cherry picking to prove his point. Yeah, if you compare The Brady Bunch to The Sopranos, the latter is clearly far more intelligent than the former. But Barney Miller (which some cops say is the most realistic show about police work ever) is superior to, say, Just shoot me, or Friends, let alone anything with Jessica Simpson or Paris Hilton in it.
Where I think the guy has a point is that shows are getting more and more self-referential. The Sopranos plays with the standard plot lines of Family and crime dramas. But they can get away with this because their audience has grown up with TV, and knows all the standard plot lines. Audiences in the seventies, let alone the fifties, were, obviously, new to TV. What seems like a cliche now, didn’t then. This isn’t because we are smarter people, but rather because we have watched a hell of a lot more TV. I’m not sure this is a good thing.
This point is even more obvious when you look at movies. Is he seriously saying that movies in the seventies–including The Godfather, and Chinatown are less sophisticated than, say, Rush hour 2? I hope not. The seventies were the last decade in which the major studios made serious intelligent films.
It’s diminishing returns, though. The analogy of the teacup and the firehose comes to mind. Yeah, there’s tons of information available cheaply and easily compared to 30 years ago, but all of that information is lying side-by-side with crap science and Bigfoot sightings on the Intarweb. You actually have to already know at least a minimal amount of information on pretty much any subject more complex than arithmetic just to know whether what you’re looking at is reliable or not. And the volume gets larger every day.
I’ve read several reviews of the book, and it sounds full of shit to me.
He notes that IQs have been rising; yeah, since the beginning of the 20th century.
TV shows better? There has been sophisticated entertainment since the beginning of the medium: The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Kovacs’ stuff, The Avengers, The Prisoner, Monty Python, etc. Star Trek, Dr. Who., etc. etc.!
Video games? I don’t have a problem with them. But before video games people who wanted to exercise their brains played chess and go and other games. If you wanted to max out on brain challenges, the opportunities were there. Video games are not really a fair example for increasing sophistication, however, since the technology has barely been around for even 30 years.
I don’t think people are stupider than they used to be, either. Perhaps the crushing busyness of modern life is actually making people smarter in certain ways. But pop culture is not getting more sophisticated, and it’s not getting worse.
Doesn’t anybody watch Jay Leno’s “jaywalking” clips?
What amazes me isn’t that people are so totally stupid–but that they are proud of it. During the Brady Bunch era, ( when life was black and white) nobody would have broadcast clips like that, and the people interviewed would have been embarrassed at looking like idiots.
Today, we are exposed to more information, but people are definitely no smarter.