Thinking Outside the Idiot Box

In response to Steven Johnson’s view that T.V makes you smarter, Dana Stevens argues that the only thing television teaches you is to watch more television. Her view is that the alleged increasing complexity of TV show plots doesn’t cause us to think critically, it merely causes us to want more of the show. She points out that shows like The Sopranos, one of the many series in this supposed smart TV era, may have more complicated plotlines but that doesn’t, as Johnson says, challenge our cognitive faculties. These elaborate outlines actively discourage viewers from thinking about anything but future episodes.
Stevens notes the sixteen minutes of commercials embedded in the episodes of these so called mind stimulating shows, which are just continuously telling us to eat this because it’ll make you happy, or to use this because we’re ugly, or go here because we’re social inept losers who ironically, are fixed to our televisions. America’s social skills are becoming more and more underdeveloped as we spend our nights observing Lauren Conrad or a pregnant teenager’s life lessons instead of experiencing our own. We long to be like these reality TV stars and actors, but you don’t see them slouched on their couch watching someone else live a fulfilling life. We feel the need to turn the TV on to fill the silence in a room, because we’d rather laugh at Saturday Night Live with our friends than talk to them.
The author tells us about the TV-B-Gone, a remote control that can turn off most TVs from twenty to fifty feet away, designed to restore tranquility in public places where televisions are placed. The question she raises about this device is whose right is it to decide what should be on television? My question is why do we need televisions in public places at all? Wal-Mart now has TVs for your viewing pleasure while you wait in line to buy your groceries, as do some gas stations. Why do we need to be entertained with dancing pictures during every minute of the day?
Your average 1960’s living room furniture was arranged to face inward, so that visitors and family could converse and discuss what the day had brought. Now we bow down to this neon God, center our time and sofa’s and meals around it, while wondering why society is getting fatter, and lazier, and coming up with technological “advances” that allow us to be only fatter and lazier yet.
I don’t think television makes you smarter at all, in fact I think it does just the opposite. I also, like Dana Stevens, don’t think it’s necessary to completely rid our routines of television. Is it possible to reverse our ways and cut back on our four hour a day TV watching, especially when they’re only getting bigger and bigger, and the clarity on the screen is becoming more vibrant than reality? We have a responsbility as humans to carry on intelligence, to read books, to be active and productive, to observe the world not through an electrical box and satellite waves, but the way we’re meant to see it- through our own eyes.