Look at Me, Look at Me

Dr. Jim Taylor writes:

American popular culture exacerbates our self-esteem problem by sending messages to children that they can find success, wealth, and celebrity without any capabilities, effort, or time ("By gosh, I deserve it right now just for being me").

From "America's Self-Esteem Problem."

The Differences Between Seeing, Looking & Watching

There's a lot of television out in the world, and there's a lot of flak about watching too much television, that it's dumbing down America and we're all wasting our lives, vegetating away in front of giant plasma screens with our super-sized soft drinks and jumbo bags of deep-fried, thinly-cut bites of artificial goodness. Mmmmm. Noming our way to a slow, sleazy and squalid surrender of sloth and gluttony.

Image via NerdFitness.

Next time you're watching a television show, though, take a closer look at what you're watching--what kind of nuances are there? Do you understand all of the jokes? Do you get all the references made by the characters in their dialog, or search for hidden clues as to discover who exactly is the villain or where the plot is going?

I'm not going to argue that television is a wholly educational or completely cognitive-challenging medium--it's really not. There's a lot of crude exploitation--of humor, of stereotypes, of human nature and of controversial subjects--but there's also a new wave of 'intellectual' programming that should not be put down, just because it's surrounded by simplistic padding.

The incredibly intelligent television show that immediately comes to mind nowadays is irrefutably, Lost.

Season 6 promotional poster. Image via IMDB.

I've never watched it (but as soon as school lets out, every episode's available on Hulu!), but when in the first episode, you have a plane crash, a mysterious tropical island and polar bears and a smoke monster, it's mind-boggling and intriguing. Reading Time's James Poniewozik's article on "TV After 'Lost,'" I discovered that Lost is more than a Gilligan's Island or Cast Away, but some funky, time-traveling and very philosophical drama that is confusing, even with a handy summary. Lost is about a lot:

...Lost would not be about tribal elections, digging wells or devising systems of coconut-shell currency. It would be a weird mystery involving time travel, the butterfly effect and conspiracies within conspiracies. It would be a spiritual journey about characters seeking redemption. It would be about big ideas: free will and predestination, science and faith, mankind's essential good or evil. Through this prism — and through narrative flashbacks, flash-forwards and flashes into an alternate reality — it would be about, well, everything.

Lost doesn't attempt to answer those eternal questions. What it does instead is challenge the audience to ponder such mysteries themselves. Cuse and Lindelof have dropped plenty of guideposts along the way. Several characters are named for authors or philosophers (Locke, Milton, Rousseau, the Zen master Dogen) whose concepts play into the story, and classic works of literature sneak into key scenes. The writers say they use these references as "a tip of the cap" to their influences, as Lindelof puts it, "as opposed to saying, 'Hey, we came up with this idea for the first time.' " Also, says Cuse, "it's usually meant to say, If you want to go deeper, here's something that you can explore." Lost is like a TV show with footnotes.

What do you see when you see this promo pic? If you said The Last Supper, you've got brains.
Image via IMDB.

Lost is part of a new wave of television watching where it's more interactive than ever, and not just because you can Tweet or update your Facebook status in real time as you watch an episode; there are fan sites and forums where viewers congregate, and it's all part of "a multimedia experience of which the show itself is the first component." Watching TV is now a really complicated thing.

A case study in Media & Culture analyzes the new wave of television:

...In contrast to older popular programs like Dallas or Dynasty, contemporary popular layers "each scene with a thick network of affiliations. You have to focus to follow the plot, and in focusing you're exercising the parts of your brain that map social networks, that fill in missing information, that connect multiple narrative threads." Johnson argues that younger audiences today--brought up in the Age of the Internet and in an era of complicated interactive visual games--bring high expectations to other kinds of popular culture as well, including television. "The mind," Johnson writes, "likes to be challenged; there's real pleasure to be found in solving puzzles, detecting patterns or unpacking a complex narrative system."

The author referenced by the case study, Steven Johnson, wrote 2005's Everything Bad is Good For You. In a pull quote, Media & Culture highlights specifically Johnson's view on the Internet's impact complicating television.

The Web has created a forum for annotation and commentary that allows more complicated shows to prosper, thanks to the fan sites where each episode of shows like Lost or Alias is dissected with an intensity usually reserved for Talmud scholars.

I think media does a lot for us, and there shouldn't be a definitively one-sided 'television is horrible for you' kind of broad statement made by critics or parents, because it really isn't.

Smarty Pants, Redux

Seth Freeman just wrote an awesome article on The Huffington Post titled 'Gifted and At-Risk,' which provides a much more cogently-worded article than mine on the 'tragedy' that befalls the ingenious.

Notable excerpts, for those who don't want to read the whole thing:

Everyone is aware of the dire straights in which our school systems currently operate, but as bad as things are generally, they are sometimes even worse for our students with the greatest potential. It turns out that this population, the very people our society will most need in the future to be competitive with other countries and to solve our toughest problems, is one of the most underserved. Less than 1 percent of the funds for special programs in our schools goes to meet the needs of gifted kids.

What may be less obvious is that gifted children often have a tougher time in school specifically as a consequence of their intelligence or talent or unique way of seeing the world.

In our schools, which are presently struggling to educate so many children to a basic low standard of knowledge and skills, the curriculum can be so boring and inane for bright kids that they become restless, occasionally disruptive but more often tuning out or not even showing up. A gifted kid who comes from a family living in poverty, or from a discriminated against minority, or who is burdened with other social disadvantages, faces a double dose of adversity. And yet, despite facing these difficulties but precisely because gifted kids are capable of understanding the material and keeping up with the work, they frequently receive less attention than their peers.

It is a tragic situation for these kids. It may be an even greater tragedy for our country's future. 

Mike Teavee, Move Over

I watch an inordinate amount of television; in the context of being GenY, it's another facet of my overwhelming consumption of media, and looking at myself, it's kind of freaky and slightly ridiculous how much I watch. Ironically, for my Communications class, our professor is constantly urging us to watch more TV.

Here is, in a roundabout table, a compilation of my TV schedule from the last year:

Yeah, I know.

Intersperse with various filler episodes of Law & Order: Special Victims' Unit, beginning to watch many of the shows halfway through Season 3 and lots of catching up, pretty regular catch-ups of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, the occasional disgusted/fascinated screening of Jersey Shore and watching through two seasons of Dirty Sexy Money in half a hectic week, and the hours of television I've consumed over the last nine months is probably well into the hundreds.

Left, Stephen Colbert of The Colbert Report (e.g. favorite newscaster ever), and right, Dirty Sexy Money, favorite now-defunct/cancelled-TV-show-that's-got-both-Billy-Baldwin-and-Donald-Sutherland-squee!!!!-yay. Images via IMDB.

One genre of television that you don't see in my schedule, however, is the game show; I've got nothing against game shows--Jeopardy ftw!--but being narcissistic and thinking better of myself than the people who are on these shows, I don't like to 'waste' my time failing (or kicking ass) on questions I ace at home.

Running home in the afternoons between classes to have a swift lunch, there's only one program my television receives that isn't an infomercial, a shopping channel, a soap opera or episode of Sesame Street--'Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?'

ARE YOU? HUNH? ARE YOU? Image via Fox.

This show is really, really well done production-wise, but what about the basic premise of this show?

Are you smarter than a fifth grader? Are you smarter than a prepubescent elementary schooler who still has recess breaks? Are you smarter than a child whose hairline is barely past your pelvis? Are you smarter than a kid who has spent the last ten years of their life sleeping, eating, crying, and occasionally flipping through picture books and scrawling through arithmetic worksheets?

True, the questions on this show are sometimes extremely specific, giving an unfair advantage to the pint-sied "assistants" of fifth-graders who are featured on the show, but there's still a large number of basic questions that are common knowledge and are relatively easy to answer. Take a quick peek below:

To the contestants on this show--are you proud that you're smarter than a fifth grader? Really? Does the fact that you're proud you're smarter than a ten-year old make you feel awkward? Or are you ashamed that you're not 'smarter than a fifth grader'? Or do you even care?

I understand why people go on this show--$$$.

But what does this television show say about America, the good ol' US of A, that this show is not only on the air, but (somewhat) popular and that people clamor to compete on air to claim that, yes, they are middle-aged, balding, fatting but still 'smart'?