Sunday's New York Times had an excerpt from Steven Johnson's new book, "Everything Bad Is Good For You". The excerpt is titled "Watching TV Makes You Smarter", and posits that the complex narratives and open-ended multiple plotlines that comprise much of today's popular TV drama (think "Alias" or "24") actually require more from the viewer than a set of eyeballs and a La-Z-Boy.
If TV is making us smarter, and I'm still not convinced that it is, then something else must be making up the difference and then some, because I realy don't think that a nation that allows a "Simple Life" to exist, let alone to return for a fourth season, is gonna win any Nobel Prizes anytime soon.
Not mentioned in the NY Times article, but also from his book and mentioned in his blog is an interesting thought-experiment: imagine video games came *before* books -- what would all the scolds be writing about in the op-ed pages when the kids dropped their gameboys and started reading all of a sudden?
(via Boing Boing)
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