aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, April 28, 2005

TV good, cluttered screens not

A friend who knows me to believe that you have to have television in your diet to be culturally and politically well-rounded and informed, wrote to be sure I didn’t miss this NYTimes Magazine piece, Watching TV Makes You Smarter:

For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the ‘’masses’’ want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But...the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of (for example) ‘’24,’’ you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago watching a comparable show. Beneath the violence and the ethnic stereotypes, another trend appears: to keep up with entertainment like ‘’24,’’ you have to pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships. This is what I call the Sleeper Curve: the most debased forms of mass diversion—video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms—turn out to be nutritional after all.

I believe that the Sleeper Curve is the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today, and I believe it is largely a force for good: enhancing our cognitive faculties, not dumbing them down.

It’s interesting, and I have yet to read the whole thing, but I note that it need not conflict with this from Kansas State University:

In the past few years, television stations have begun to reformat their screen presentations to include scrolling screens, sports scores, stock prices and current weather news. These visual elements are all designed to give viewers what they want when they want it.

However, Kansas State University professors Lori Bergen and Tom Grimes say that it’s not working. [...]

“We discovered that when you have all of this stuff on the screen, people tend to remember about 10 percent fewer facts than when you don’t have it on the screen,” Grimes said. “Everything you see on the screen—the crawls, the anchor person, sports scores, weather forecast—are conflicting bits of information that don’t hang together semantically. They make it more difficult to attend to what is the central message...The outcome of all of the experiments was that people were splitting their attention into too many parts to understand any of the content.”

Via David Pescovitz at Boing Boing here and here.

WELCOME Moderate Voice readers; I appreciate your coming to visit! THANK YOU Joe Gandelman for adding me to your blogroll and for the link.