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Watching TV Programs : Impacts on Children's Education
Television and education essay
Effects of television on education essay
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In the book Everything Bad Is Good For You written by Steven Johnson, he describes the sleeper curve in relation to media and games. He also describes how games have become more complex. Johnson also shows us how different genres of television shows like reality shows and comedies have become more intricate. The author describes how today’s popular culture is actually making us smarter. He poses a theory that all the media that we fathom has been becoming more sophisticated each year which is actually making our minds sharper than we may think.
He starts off with explaining his opinion about how pop culture, although increasingly becoming more complex, it is making people more intelligent. The book is divided into two sections. The first part argues how television, video games, and movies have become more elaborate and complicated, meanwhile the second part summarizes how media connects with becoming more intelligent. He starts off by giving us a little bit of background information about the sleeper curve. The sleeper curve is about how pop culture is becoming more intellectually demanding. Johnson says, “Today’s popular culture may not be showing us the righteous path. But it is making us smarter” (14). He shows us in some examples how students manage to
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understand a set of rules when engaged in video games, but struggle in a classroom. He shows how different types of media are better at presenting different tasks to you. He believes that displaying media in the form of a book is the most powerful way of showing more complicated media. Johnson makes a comparison of how video games have become increasingly more difficult by comparing games such as Pong or Pacman to games like Ultima or Everquest.
Johnson also describes neurological reward circuitry using a Tetris example. He says, “Just as Tetris streamlines the fuzzy world of visual reality to a core set of interacting shapes, most games offer a fictional world where rewards are larger, and more vivid, more clearly defined than life” (36). He explains how we make decisions in games using probing and telescoping. Probing is when new knowledge is acquired based on interactions with a game or system. Telescoping is the player’s ability to coordinate among immediate and long-term
goals. Johnson states that television has become more complex through multiple threading and flashing arrows. “Part of the cognitive work comes from multiple threads, keeping often densely interwoven plotlines distinct in your head as you watch. But another part involves the viewer’s ‘filling in’: making sense of the information that has been either deliberately withheld or deliberately left obscure” (63). Flashing arrows are cinematic devices that separate substance from texture. Flashing arrows “reduce the amount of analytic work you need to make sense of a story. All you have to do is follow the arrows” (74). When flashing arrows are removed, the audience needs to to concentrate on what’s going on to understand. I feel that I disagree with the idea that social media and television is making us smarter. I think that in a way, technology is making us dumber. Although most instances of technology are more convenient and helpful, I feel that people become too reliant on them to the point where they don’t feel the need to remember certain things. I believe that people rely too much on the use of google and google maps to help them. Nowadays, most people resort to googling a problem or question rather than figuring it out themselves. Also, with google maps, people consult google maps to get directions to a certain destination. Like I said before, it’s definitely more convenient, but what I question the most is, what would happen if one day, all of that became inaccessible? What I wonder is if younger generations of people, such as my generation, would know how to get directions to a place by consulting an actual map? In the end, as convenient as technology may be, I find that it makes us dumber.
Not only educational shows accomplish these goals, but fictional television programs can often incorporate information that requires viewers to grapple with a topic using logical reasoning and a global consciousness. In addition, not to diminish the importance of reading, television reaches those who may never pick up a book or who might struggle with reading problems, enabling a broader spectrum of people to interact with cognitive topics. Veith has committed the error of making generalizations about two forms of media when, in truth, the situation varies depending on quality and content. However, what follows these statements is not just fallacious, but
While his best arguments come from cultural criticism. Written text led to the decline of oral reading and television obliterated the radio. Every technology comes with it’s trade-offs, it just comes down to moderation. There is little doubt that the internet is changing our brain. What Carr neglects to mention, however, is how the internet can change our brain for the better. Computer games have the ability to improve cognitive tasks and increase visual attention. He doesn’t always address the good effects that the internet has had on the world. One of the better strategies Carr uses is switching his point of view from third to first person. He reflects on his personal life and how his life has changed in response to what he has learned. Carr shows how even he has his faults but, being aware of a problem is the first step to finding
In "thinking outside the idiot box", Dana Stevens responds to Steven Johnson's New York Times article in which Johnson believes that watching television makes you smarter. Indeed, Steven Johnson claimed that television shows have become more and more complex over the years in order to follow the viewers need for an interesting plot instead of an easy, linear story. However, Dana Stevens is opposed to this viewpoint. Stevens is not against television, he does not think it makes you smarter nor that it is poisenous for the brain, he simply states that the viewer should watch television intelligently. That is to say that, viewers should know how much television they should watch and what to watch as well.
In “Cultural Illiteracy,” a preface to the novel The Dumbest Generation, Mark Bauerlein critically evaluates how technological distractions affect the younger generation. Bauerlein states that “digital diversions” are cutting the younger generation off from culturally enhancing mediums and is in turn making the younger generation less intelligent. Though Bauerlein is correct about the increase of peer pressure due to technology, he is mistaken about how technology is making the younger generation unintelligent.
Has the modernization of the twentieth century made us smarter or has it hindered our brains to think in 140 characters or less? In the article, “Brain Candy”, Steven Johnson argues that the “steady upward trajectory” in global I.Q scores is due to what we thought was making us dumber: popular culture. However, this romantic critic is too rooted in his technology- age ideology. While Johnson claims that everything bad is good for us, family themed-programing is being replaced by fabricated reality television shows and channels specialized in selling, video games are hindering our reading and writing skills, and books are becoming things of the past. Johnson insists that popular culture is making us smarter, but is stupid the new smart?
Carr, Nicholas G. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W. Norton, 2010. Print.
Trying to reflect the fears instilled in himself through comparison to an unrealistic movie. I believe that the internet hasn’t changed everyone’s the way the he says its changed his. I think that people who were born into the world of technology have the ability to analyze into a deeper thought what is needed and skim for instant answer when it’s not needed. On the other side those whom have been forced to adapt to it, such as Carr, find themselves losing abilities they once relied on because they were taught growing up to do both things. Now that the internet has forced them to adapt to it, they can’t focus of doing both types of thinking. The complexity of our minds is deep and that can’t be made shallow by the ability to get instant gratification of information. We simply begin to rule out unimportant things, once the important thing is found then it can be analyzed. Although Carr says his mind isn’t going as far as it used to, clearly that’s exactly what he did in this essay. He used the older “traditional way” of over-analyzing unnecessary things to reach a point that ends up being moot. Clearly, his use of logos, ethos and pathos, although present were not enough to prove his opinion to be
The central message the author is trying to convey is that the rapid scanning of information we do on the internet negatively effects our intelligence. Also he would like everyone to be aware he is writing a book that you can buy.
Graff begins by talking about the educational system, and why it flawed in many ways, but in particular, one: Todays schools overlook the intellectual potential of street smart students, and how shaping lessons to work more readily with how people actually learn, we could develop into something capable of competing with the world. In schools, students are forced to recite and remember dull and subject heavy works in order to prepare them for the future, and for higher education. “We associate the educated life, the life of the mind, too narrowly and exclusively with subjects and texts that we consider inherently weighty and academic. We assume that it’s possible to wax intellectual about Plato, Shakespeare, the French Revolution, and nuclear fission, but not about cars, dating, fashion, sports, TV, or video games.” (Graff, 198-199) In everyday life, students are able to learn and teach themselves something new everyday. It is those students, the “young person who is impressively “street smart” but does poorly in school” (Graff, 198), that we are sweeping away from education and forcing to seek life in places that are generally less successful than those who attend a college or university.
Many of the technological advancements in entertainment helped people live a much happier and exciting life. The television was wanted by almost every average American family in this decade and overwhelmed millions of baby-boomer children who’s relationship with TV has influenced the United States’ culture and politics. Television
He feels as if critics need to take a reality check, “When comic books were accused of turning juveniles into delinquents in the 1950s, crime was falling to record lows, just as the denunciations of video games in the 1900’s coincided with the great American crime decline.” He feels that the advances in technology has no affect on our brain’s cognitive functions feels there is no evidence on disabling our learning capabilities. Pinker’s disposition on the positive outcome of technological advances is so profound, he feels it is even correlated with the rise in IQ”s in the modern years. He acknowledges that access to mass media is a powerful tool that can engulf one’s life. Pinker just feels that all humans have self-control and are able to put their phone down when the time is
Wright’s topic is video games, an area he knows well in, and in his article, “dream Machines”, he explains how video games has helped today’s youth b creative and imaginative. He says games help the youth develop more, for as children we would have our own games and set rules and goals. But technology such as “computers have been understood as an extension of the human brain” (Wright, 4). And so imagine what video games, a more complex device then computers, can do when people are given the chance to decide their own. For video games were once simple when they first started out but as time and technology advances, so did the video games. Thy have become more elaborate, more graphic causing the player to think outside of the box to try to achieve new ways to let out their imagination roam free and help them in the process of playing. While many adults have a negative view of video games, and is they have, they have played it and gotten angry at it for they did not understand the concept of the controls of the game. Which what makes the youth of today much more open in playing for they don’t need to understand or read the manual to play, its trial and error to them. They learn and understand as the play along. They know that can try again. They understand that it may be difficult but they still try and they keep their mind open for new outcomes. Thiers minds are open and accepting to new information and ways of thinking. Which is what makes the youth of today different from past generations who were taught one way of thinking and being
Carr discusses the effects that the Internet has on our minds and the way we think, as well as the way media has changed. Our minds no longer focus. When in conversation with people we are constantly distracted by the technological advances our era has brought. Text messages, emails, pop culture drama has all taken over thoughts.
It has been a common discussion for us to dismiss television as a result of the negative things that most of the young viewers tend to copy and practice later on after watching. Johnson is mistaken when he says watching television makes you smarter and because he overlooks the fact that reality television does not teach us what is really going on in our society. For example, shows like “fear factor” (Johnson, 293) where people are being asked and deceived to do crazy things like overcoming their fear and would stoop down so low for the money. Johnson claims that “we need a change in the criteria we use to determine what really cognit...
Pop culture is a reflection of social change, not a cause of social change” (John Podhoretz). It encompasses the advertisements we see on T.V, the clothes we wear, the music we listen too, and it’s the reason Leonardo DiCaprio has not won an Oscar yet. It defines and dictates the desires and fears of the mainstream members of society; and it is so ingrained into our lives that it has become as natural as breathing. Moreover, adults never even bat an eyelash at all the pop culture and advertising that surrounds them since it has become just another part of everyday life. Pop culture is still somewhat seen as entertainment enjoyed by the lower class members of society; but pop culture standards change over time. A notable example of this is the sixteenth century author, William Shakespeare, since his works were considered pop culture, entertainment that could be enjoyed by everyone, but now they are considered literary classics. While pop culture encompasses most aspects of our lives, its influence is most obvious through each generations reaction to media,