Watching Television Makes You Smarter Essay

“Watching TV Makes You Smarter” In the article, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” Steven Johnson claims that the progression of modern television series is making viewers smarter because of their complex plots and multi-threading techniques. I question Johnson’s statement because there is a difference between gaining knowledge and conditioning your brain by noticing techniques that are in television shows today. One gains knowledge by learning and being tested over different subject. Whereas, watching TV trains our brains to recognize the patterns that are embedded within the many plots and scenes in an episode. These brain-based skills have more to do with remembering and problem solving rather than becoming more intelligent. With that,…

article, Watching TV Makes You Smarter, Steven Johnson argues that many of the shows that our population considers unhealthy are actually relatively healthy for our brains. On the other hand, Dana Stevens argues in her essay, Thinking Outside The Idiot Box, that Steven Johnson’s thesis makes absolutely no sense and that television in no way gets our brains thinking or makes us smarter. Johnson starts by explaining what he calls the Sleeper Curve. He does this by comparing older TV shows like…

The debate on whether television programs are making society more educated has gone on for years. Author Steven Johnson goes into extensive and specific research about this topic in his article, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter”. Throughout the writing piece, Johnson discusses the differences in television from two decades ago, a decade ago, fives years ago versus television now. His argument is strongly saying that TV series’ and programs have advanced conspicuously by introducing more complexity…

Steven Johnson is an author and teaches journalism at New York University. In one of his writings “watching TV makes you smarter” he mentions that some TV shows and video games might “dumb us down”. However, the Sleepers Curve argues that in the other hand, watching TV might just be making the viewer smarter. He indicates that the media presumed that people are simply satisfied with the quality of the TV shows they would watch, but with the years culture is getting more cognitively…

Not many people look beyond the statement that “T.V. is an idiot box” but writer Steven Johnson does and in result he makes you second guess your own opinion. Steven Johnson’s article Watching T.V. Makes you Smarter first appeared in the New York Times Magazine in 2005 it was an excerpt from his book Everything Bad is Good for You. In this article Johnson aims to convince his audience that certain video games, violent television dramas, and juvenile sitcoms can be beneficial to the human brain…

Have you ever been told that palying video games and watching television for several hours throughout that day can wreck a child’s brain? In the article called “Brain Candy” written by Malcolm Gladwell,, states that watching television or playing video games is just as important as reading a book or doing homework. Gladwell states facts that video games and television are raising our I.Q. levels rather than lowering them due to all the technology advancement. Pop culture is helping to make…

“You’re going to rot your brain out from watching that T.V.!” is a phrase that I heard all too much growing up, as I’m sure many other people did too. However, in today’s age I cannot help but wonder how much validity that phrase now holds. In 2005, the New York Times Magazine published an excerpt of one of Steven Johnson’s books, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today’s Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter which address this exact question. Johnson’s debut in the New York Times…

University found that watching comedy clips actually improves memory. The essay that “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” by Steven Johnson argues that many shows on TV that our population claims to be bad are actually healthy for our brains to watch. He explains how the right shows on TV, if watched, will increase your brain activity and will make you think deeper. He considers “good TV” to be any shows that requires one to engage into action. Johnson believes that although there is a bad side to…

I challenge you to eat a meal and not pick up your cell phone, to check Facebook or to check the status of a game you are playing on your phone. Look around you the next time your at a sit down restaurant or a family gathering and see how many individuals are using there cell phones instead of having a real conversation with the individual next to them. How many meals at home do you sit at the dinner table or are you in front of the television watching the next episode of your favorite…

Summary on “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” In “Watching TV Makes You Smarter,” author Steven Johnson explains how TV has changed throughout the years. This article was published in The New York Times Magazine in 2008, contains 18 pages, and is separated into four sections. It has references towards the author and diagrams that demonstrate threads. The purpose of “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” is to inform every adult and young adults who watch TV that watching shows can affect their minds. In…