Final Blog!

Steven Johnson’s main point is that popular culture is actually making us much smarter, instead of dumbing us down. In fact, he likes to look at how popular culture makes us, the audience, think more intelligently. As we all know, television and films are much more complicated than they used to be. Instead of having one plot and two characters that the audience would follow, there are many small plots including many characters that somehow tie together in the end. Also, video games teach us more skills than reading a book does. Video games are not what they used to be and they have much more complicated plays that are in demand.
“To watch an episode of “Dallas” today is to be stunned by its glacial pace—by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of “The Sopranos,” by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot. Modern television also requires the viewer to do a lot of what Johnson calls “filling in,” as in a “Seinfeld” episode that subtly parodies the Kennedy assassination conspiracists, or a typical “Simpsons” episode, which may contain numerous allusions to politics or cinema or pop culture” (Gladwell, The New Yorker). The television shows are becoming more complicated as the years go by.
“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 as that ''24'' episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less. To make sense of an episode of ''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” (Johnson, NY Times).
“But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the last half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks” (Johnson, NY Times). Multiple threading, flashing arrows, and social networks really is what defines complicated popular culture that we have today. People that consume popular culture see these methods of developing complicated shows and films, which allow people to develop great cognitive skills.
I truly believe that popular culture does develop cognitive skills that books just don’t give us. I think it’s fascinating to compare the complexities of shows and films today. The most important thing is how the complexity is not even noticed today. We have become so accustomed to these types of shows that we don’t even realize how complex they actually are. I think that it has made us smarter. However, I don’t think it’s made us more intelligent as a whole. It has definitely helped us in some skills. However, I don’t think it’s helped us with everything. You can definitely call me traditional. I believe that a book can teach you more than anything else.

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/05/16/050516crbo_books

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/04/24/magazine/24TV.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5090&en=e08bc7c1e7acbb59&ex=1271995200&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss

My Blogging Experience

My blogging experience has been a really great learning experience. Everyone in my group had a topic that I’ve never heard of. It was the first time I heard of Atmosphere, Guitar Hero, and David Lynch movies. I went from not even hearing about these topics to knowing the popular culture meaning behind them by all of the critical analysis. I had fun reading about these topics. If I had an academic article on these topics, I wouldn’t have been highly interested in them as I am when reading my fellow classmates’ opinions on them. All of the theories, concepts, and discourses we learned in the course are very difficult and confusing to understand fully. I think that writing shorter than traditional papers was better to understand them more clearly, especially when being related to a specific topic. Papers would be a good learning experience as well, however, I don’t think papers would have had a greater impact on the students than the blog assignments. Also, these blog assignments made me much more comfortable with using the Internet and blogs on the computer. Because of how comfortable I actually became with blogging, I was able to use it in different classes as well for certain projects and assignments.
The only thing that was tough about my blogging experience was the fact that there was an assignment due each week. The only reason why it was tough because I was taking another class at the same time that had posts due every week as well. It was hard to keep up with both during the same semester, just because I was just getting adjusted to posting over the Internet this semester. I’ve only had a couple of posting assignments in the past during my entire college experience.
I’m glad that I was able to apply all of the discourses to my semester topic, Nip/Tuck. I think it was a great experience to look at Nip/Tuck through a different lens. I learned how popular culture applied to my topic and how the producers and the audience view the show very differently. I’m a little less interested in the show now that I have seen the discourses applied to my topic. It’s made me feel as though the show is completely pointless to watch. I’m not excited for the new season to begin because I know that as I watch it I’m going to be thinking of the concepts we have learned in the class. However, when I apply the concepts to other shows I currently watch I get more interested in those shows. I think it’s the fact that I have focused on Nip/Tuck alone and have gone into greater detail with Nip/Tuck though the assignments we had. As I watch other shows and apply discourses to them, I’m not going into as great of detail as I did with Nip/Tuck.