comic book
In the article “watching TV Makes you smarter “by Steve Johnson, he claims that watching TV can actually make you smarter. Johnson claims that television these days seems to be more complex than in earlier years, so by watching it were putting our thinking caps on. Even for example the show 24, it’s based on Muslim terrorists and torture scenes but he believes it to be more educational then anything. TV doesn’t need to dumb you down or waste your time we can be learning things throughout the episodes. Shows that are on now have more than one story line going on at a time. We have to actually pay attention and try to follow the characters and how they relate. So by television having more complexity and more drama going on it forces us to think therefore TV makes us smarter. Johnson argues that by watching TV shows you can become smarter. “to keep up…you have to pay attention make inferences, track shifting relationships” (pg279) Johnson calls this the” sleeper curve.” Just by us watching an episode of 24 our cognitive skills are growing because were learning about world culture. The show 24 is based on Muslim terrorist and extremely violent scenes, but Johnson believes by exposing us to information such as this were learning as we go. Decades ago we had very simple plots and scenarios in our television shows such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, didn’t make us think too much. Johnson explains ...”there’s no intellectual labor involved in enjoying the show as a viewer” (p280). Shows that we watch today keep us guessing as to what will happen next, we sometimes don’t even realize that our brains are working thinking about more complex details that could happen. The show ER is a good example of even if we don’t understand the entire dialog between the doctors and characters it keeps us intrigued and we follow along best we can with the medical terms we already know. Following along to such dialog we can learn a thing or two and start to understand what we’re