Watching Tv Makes You Smarter, By Steven Johnson - 898 Words

Television is a great source of knowledge and it interests many people. Some people have the same belief while others do not for many different reasons. In the first article â€Å"Watching TV Makes You Smarter, Steven Johnson argues why and how television can make you smarter. In another article, â€Å"Thinking Outside the Idiot Box, Dana Stevens contradicts everything Steven Johnson said in his article about television making people more intelligent. Steven Johnson s argument is that television can actually make you smarter because when you watch a show, you are trying to understand everything that is happening. Today’s shows have a lot of action and scenes trying to keep people’s attention. Therefore, people carefully tune in to television shows trying to understand everything that goes on during the show. Johnson said, â€Å"You have to pay attention, make inferences, and track shifting social relationships.† For instance, depending on how the characters interact with one another, changes happen as the plot of the story continues on. An example of this is if a character happens to disagree with another character and an enemy of both characters comes into the mix, and those two characters join forces to defeat their enemy. The spontaneous changes like this constantly change the storyline to make it more interesting for the viewer. Johnson mentions the â€Å"Sleeper Curve† and how it is considered to â€Å"enhance our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down. The author displayed severalShow MoreRelatedWatching Tv Makes You Smarter, By Steven Johnson872 Words   |  4 PagesIn the article â€Å"Watching TV Makes You Smarter, Steven Johnson argues why and how television can make you smarter. In another article, â€Å"Thinking Outside the Idiot Box, Dana Stevens contradicts everything Steven Johnson said in his article about television making people more intelligent. Steven Johnson s argument is that television can actually make you smarter because when you watch a show, you are trying to understand everything that is happening. Today’s shows have a lot of action and scenesRead MoreWatching Tv Makes You Smarter -Steven Johnson Essay4824 Words   |  20 PagesWatching TV Makes You Smarter By STEVEN JOHNSON The Sleeper Curve SCIENTIST A: Has he asked for anything special? SCIENTIST B: Yes, this morning for breakfast . . . he requested something called wheat germ, organic honey and tigers milk. SCIENTIST A: Oh, yes. Those were the charmed substances that some years ago were felt to contain life-preserving properties. SCIENTIST B: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies or . . . hot fudge? SCIENTIST A: Those were thoughtRead MoreThinking Outside the Idiot Box by Dana Stevens vs. â€Å"Watching TV Makes You Smarter† by Steven Johnson1125 Words   |  5 PagesEnglish Comp I Kayal 11/5/13 TV Does Not Make You Smarter There is no doubt that television holds a purpose in our society today, but is that purpose brain-numbing or actually beneficial to our brain development? The television, also known as: TV, the boob tube, the idiot box, as well as many other nicknames, has been around for almost a hundred years. Ever since cable TV became popular in the 1950’s, there has always been a worry that people watch too much TV. Most people believe that with exorbitantRead MoreWatching Tv Makes You Smart Essay1218 Words   |  5 PagesIn the article  Watching TV Makes You Smarter  by Steven Johnson, the author argues that by watching television shows various television shows, people actually become smarter and how it has a big impact in our lives. He feels that watching TV makes us smarter because why we view things we might have never heard of before. He also uses dialogs to explain for example he used dialogs from the show ER to break down what’s happening between the characters, what words and sentences there using. On responseRead MoreEssay on A TV Education1326 Words   |  6 PagesA TV Education â€Å"For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest common-denominator standards, presumably because the â€Å"masses† want dumb† (Johnson 214).But do the masses actually want to get the opposite out of their TV programming? Steven Johnson author of Mind Wide Open: Your brain and the neuroscience of everyday life and five other books thinks that they do and has done much research to try and prove that watching TV may actuallyRead MoreDoes Television Make Use Dumber? Essay535 Words   |  3 Pagestelevision and blame it for problems we have in society along with making viewers dumber. Johnson’s Watching TV Makes You Smarter and Stevens’s Thinking Outside The Idiot Box have near opposite positions on the issue of television, both describing what they feel is the right answer when it comes to television and society. Throughout Steven Johnson’s Watching TV Makes You Smarter, he compares hit TV shows like Dragnet and Starsky and Hutch to that of more recent shows like The Sopranos. He explainsRead MoreTelevision : An Important Aspect For People s Life1276 Words   |  6 Pagestoday’s society has taken up a vast amount of time in people’s life. People can spend hours in a day just watching t.v. mindlessly, however, is this time spent watching t.v. making a person smarter? The television shows that people watch today are a primary form of entertainment for a majority of America, along with conveying information to viewers. For years now people have wanted dumb, simple tv, but as the culture began to develop more cognitively people want complex and intelligent television. IRead MoreAre Tv Makes You Smarter?971 Words   |  4 PagesAre TV’s actually bad for you In the book They say I say, is an article called â€Å"Thinking outside the idiot box.† This essay was written by Dana Stevens and was first published in slates march 25, 2005 in a direct response to â€Å"Watching TV makes you smarter.† Within this article Stevens is completely disagreeing with Steven Johnson in the that she believes his entire article was a joke. Stevens opinion is that watching television does more harm than it could possibly do good for people. During DanaRead MoreEssay Television and Its Impacts on Society 1171 Words   |  5 Pagesbeen a major topic of discussion. Specifically, many debate societal benefits to television watching. One widely accepted opinion is that watching TV makes people dumber. People have referred to it with terms like the â€Å"idiot box† and do not feel that watching TV has any benefit at all. They feel that it is a waste of time and people need to spend their hours more wisely. Others are of the opinion that TV is actually has societal benefits. From this perspective, they claim that the developmentRead MoreDoes Watching TV Make You Stupid?923 Words   |  4 Pagesï » ¿The Role and Value of Television Introduction In Watching TV makes you smarter, published in The New York Times on April 24, 2005, Steven Johnson argues for the multiple threads, fewer flashing arrows and social networking that make modern Television nourishing cognitive food. In answer to Johnsons article, Carrie posted Does watching TV make you stupid? on May 1, 2005. Carrie presents further blogs on May 3rd and May 7th, 2005; however, the gist of her arguments are contained in her first