Does Watching TV Make You Smarter?

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Does TV make us smarter?

    Before this week, I would have said situationally yes but mostly no. I thought this because most of the time, TV is used to procrastinate or as a distraction, in my case.  Just an excuse to not do what you should be doing or as time to turn your brain off and let someone else think. A few shows that fill this need to not think are Gilmore Girls, Sex and the City, and The Great British Baking Show. I feel like these all give very different vibes, but they scratch the itch. So these specific shows aren’t helping me learn anything or make me smarter in the typical sense, but for me, they helped me learn different social things that I didn’t know, Gilmore Girls showed me what a semi-normal college experience looks like, it helped me navigate the important relationships in my life, like how Lorelai does with her mom and Rory with her boyfriends and friends. Sex and the City taught me about adult relationships, about a city I didn’t know a lot about, and how to make friends outside of my school. The Great British Baking Show has been a comfort show for me for a long time, but I love to bake, so the show helps me feel connected to that and new techniques and recipes to try. So, while it can be often used as an excuse, I did learn a lot from these shows, even if that wasn’t the intention. 


I read an article this week claiming that TV does make people smarter, it was fittingly titled, Watching TV Makes You Smarter by Steven Johnson. It talked about how, as our society gets smarter, so does our media. I found it especially interesting how he said that even bad TV is getting better. By this, he meant that our bad TV, like The Bachelor (which I religiously watch), is making the audiences smarter by the way that they are presenting information on the show. The producers aren’t making arrows pointing to the answers or the questions we should be asking, they are making us have our own opinions and think a little harder. A comparison that I made was between the show Gilmore Girls and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a show from the late 90s, and you don’t have to think about that one. The show is one I like to use for background noise because it is extremely predictable, and each episode follows a similar plot line, Buffy finds an artifact, the artifact is related to vampires, a vampire tries to take over her town, and Buffy saves them all. Very predictable and has good background noise. Gilmore Girls, on the other hand, makes you think a little bit harder and was released about 20 years later in 2006. The show is about a young mom and her daughter's journey through high school and college and the complicated relationships in their lives. It makes you think about if what they're saying is true, and sometimes Lorelai can be an unreliable narrator, but it keeps me on my toes and the show interesting. TV can definitely make you smarter, but it definitely depends on the show and the intention behind it. I’m definitely not going to be the person to tell you to stop watching or to change what you're watching because that would be very hypocritical of me. So change what you watch or don’t, but at least enjoy what you're watching.  




Comments

  1. Professor KnauerOctober 12, 2024 at 9:33 AM

    Abby,
    A fun to read blog, incorporating ideas from the article (Johnson) with your personal experience. You build a good case for your partial agreement with the author, that TV might make us smarter (but mostly it's entertaining) and brings relief from stress.
    Great graphics and good examples.
    Professor Knauer

    ReplyDelete

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