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. 

On Homophobia

The following is an excerpt from Roger R. Hock's Forty Studies That Changed Psychology: Explorations into the History of Psychological Research (6th Edition) that is an assigned reading for my psychology class. In the reading about Sigmund Freud's concept of ego defense mechanisms (defined by the book as "psychological 'weapons' that your ego uses to protect you from your self-created anxiety") and Anna Freud's (his daughter) elaborations on those mechanisms, a passage regarding homophobia caught my eye:

One fascinating study may have found supporting scientific evidence that homophobia, an irrational fear, avoidance, and prejudice toward gay and lesbian individuals, may be a reaction formation used to ward off the extreme anxiety caused by a person's own repressed homosexual tendencies (Adams, Wright, & Lohr, 1996). In this study, a group of men were given a written test to determine their level of homophobia and then divided into two groups: homophobic and nonhomophobic. Then participants were exposed to videos depicting explicit heterosexual gay, or lesbian sexual scenes, and while they viewed these videos they were monitored for physiological signs of sexual arousal. The only difference found between the groups was when they viewed the videos of gay males. In this condition, "The results indicate that hte homophobic men showed a significant increase in [arousal], but that the [nonhomophobic] men did not" (p. 443). In fact, 66% of the nonhomophobic group showed no significant signs of arousal while viewing the homosexual video, but only 20% of the homophobic group showed little or no evidence of arousal. Furthermore, when asked to rate their level of arousal, the homophobic men underestimated their degree of arousal in response to the homosexual video. This study's results are clearly consistent with Anna Freud's description of the defense mechanism of reaction formation and lend support for a possible explanation of violence targeted against gay individuals.

 Adams, H., Wright, L., & Lohr, B. (1996). Is homophobia associated with homosexual arousal? Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105(3), 440-445.

RIP Rue

Rue McClanahan, most famous for portraying Blanche Devereaux on The Golden Girls. Image via The Mick's Grill.

I never really watched her show, but whenever I flipped to it and she came on the screen so unabashedly comfortable and vibrant with her need for physical intercourse in the years where we don't like to think about people having sex (spoiler! The Notebook's ending = 2 old people having sex = ewwwwwwww). Blanche really knew how and quite shamelessly liked to get it on. She's like the original Samantha, so props.

Misleading

I understand the necessity to drive traffic, gather hits and push sales in the publishing industry, but purposely using deceptive headlines makes me angry.

Screenshot of AnnArbor.Com.

Empathy is being able to relate to others' feelings, to be capable of sharing another's emotions or feelings; implying that college students are less 'nice' or amiable has nothing to do with empathy.

I'm Yellow

Partly out of laziness, and partly to celebrate the end of another Asian Pacific American Heritage Month (APAHM), I present an essay I wrote last year in applying for a scholarship sponsored by the Organization of Chinese Americans (OCA). My heritage has been something I have always grappled with, both the good and the bad, but in writing this essay, I really explored and determined what being Asian-American has really meant to me and how I have developed into the person I am; reading popular literature, watching popular television and movies, listening to popular radio--I am always struck by how little representation there is on behalf of Asian-Americans, and that's a real shame. For not only the Asian-American community, but for the larger American community, I am really grateful to the OCA for providing me the opportunity last year to really elucidate on youth, on history, and on growth:

As part of the age class commonly known as Generation Y, I am pampered by excess, nurtured by technology, and in general, different.  Social scientists categorize me, and my fellow members of the “Millenials,” as possessing a feeling of entitlement wholly unknown to the generations before: we expect—and feel entitled to—a wealthy, instantaneously gratifying lifestyle of mentally invigorating work and easily accessible leisure.  Attending college is no longer symbolic of being gifted, but another expectation for us to meet.

As an Asian-American and having a cultural background of high expectations, attending college—specifically, and stereotypically, Ivy League—has been the milieu of my past fourteen years being educated.  My own parents did not set my life before me at the beginning of my academic journey, but growing up as an ABC (American-born Chinese), I was nonetheless sucked into the mindset that I would eventually grow up, finish high school, go to college, go to medical school (or law school or engineering school), and live the rest of my life as a some kind of professional.

The manufactured dream ended when I was nine and in fourth grade, the first year schoolteachers gave us letter grades instead of checks and pluses.  I opened the envelope on the bus ride home, anxiously excited to see the beginnings of a wonderful future as the bus rumbled through the neighborhood; the As, in Mathematics and Reading and Social Studies excited me, especially the A+ next to the Math.  I had an A- in English, but that was livable.  Workable.  Improvable.  But the B+ in science?

I was an absolute disgrace; how was I supposed to get into Harvard with a B in science, of all subjects?  My mouth was dry, my legs trembled, my head spun—really, it did—and I knew then that I would never be a doctor or an engineer or a pharmacist.  I couldn’t.  I had a B+.  No, no no no no.

To be pithy, I got over it.  Retrospectively, ruling out those three occupations prematurely has led me to go beyond the bounds of expectation.  I have met my parents’ basic expectations, which have become my own: high standardized test scores, high GPA, and a schedule filled with academically challenging classes.  I have also defied their inherent demands of me to pursue my own visions: instead of participating in Science Olympiad, I have done labor—physical, not mental—in building a school in Nicaragua.  Instead of becoming a piano prodigy, I quit my lessons to become competent on the viola, and instead of pursuing mathematics—the one fourth grade subject I was “outstanding” in—I quit the Mathletes to begin, and never finish, writing seven books.

Being an Asian-American has, must frustratingly, placed me within a category to which I do not wish to conform.  My parents and my culture, even my appearance, bring about stereotype and discrimination; conversely, those very same aspects have given me the necessities to which I can pursue any path of my choosing wholeheartedly, even rebellion.  I am a confident, competent, cultured and conscious girl—I’m still seventeen—and soon I will be a confident, competent, cultured and conscious collegiate.

I could say all that confidence, competence, culture and conscience are intrinsic, but my heritage has taught me to be humble; who I am, and who my peers are, has been wholly crafted by our ethnicity, whether in acceptance or defiance of the expectations placed on us by the community, and recognition and appreciation of my roots is the slow product of maturation.  By cultural standards, comprehension should be instantaneous and credit given where credit due; by reality’s course, people are obtuse and slow to realize value.  I’ll assist them.

Smarty Pants

I'm smart. It's undeniable, and may sound more than a bit narcissistic and egotistical (I am both), but it is also a true, scientific fact. I have a high IQ, faster than average neural reaction time (leading to faster comprehension), high test scores, and a (relatively short) lifetime of cognitively stimulating environments thanks to Mom and Dad.

When somebody tells me I'm smart, though, that kind of flippant remark makes me very angry. It may seem very complimentary, on the complimenter's side, but what exactly does it mean to be on the other side?

For me, personally, as I've said, I'm angry. I'm annoyed. It's like pigeonholing me with a single word, reducing me to a single aspect that implies I have no depth beyond understanding what goes on in class. It's like, Wow, it must be great, to be soooo smart. Except for, of course, the stereotypical schoolyard bullying and lacking adequate social skills.

If you wanna try and treat me like Millhouse, I'll eat you.

Image via HiddenGlasgow.

I am decidedly not your stereotypical 'smart kid.' I'm a pretty normal kid who interacts pretty well within society, and what really sucks the most about being smart is just that--in school (K-12 for the purposes of my commentary), being smart meant I was rarely challenged by schoolwork and I could get by relying, more or less, on my short-term memory or natural sponge-like quality for absorbing information passively. On the rare occasion I had to study for a subject--'studying' being defined for my peers as poring laboriously over notes taken in class in addition to amending the notes handed out by a teacher--'studying' for me meant sleepily flipping through the notes handed out the ten minutes before I sat down for an exam and got somewhere in the 90s, no sweat.

Seems great, right? Less time studying, better results than 90% of the other students and more time to lounge around and do anything I wanted... but no, being smart has backfired, and no, it may not be as saddening or heartbreaking as those who don't have the opportunity or the cognitive potential for a great education, but it stinks to be smart.

For the smart kids, but not genius-level students, average schoolwork is still not challenging enough such skills as perseverance and focus, such skills that are a). important for life in general, and b). really, really hard to develop nowadays, regardless of intelligence level, a long attention span when the television, the cell phone, the Internet are all calling out simultaneously. Instead of actively working to develop study skills and learning to apply oneself at the time where the mind is most fertile for learning, I didn't.

In college, this has definitely bit me in the ass. Focus, yes, should largely be on improving opportunities for the under-privileged to get the education they need, but don't forget about the students who aren't being adequately challenged by school-material and are floating by in life, because that's not preparing them for the future either.

Multitasking--Hulu, Excessive Reading & Fashion Porn

A lot of my time is spent, obviously looking at (moving) pictures--Ronye asked 'how [I] balance all the TV shows that [I] watch,' and what I do is usually try and catch only one or two TV shows a night. On days when I don't have class, or when I've got free time, I log onto Hulu, drag the window to one half of my screen, and in a second window, go on with my Internet habits of (as afore-clarified in title).

A screenshot of what I'm doing right now.

Obviously, right now, I am watching TV (a passive activity) and typing this blog. Normally, however, I'm running through my Google Reader feed (usually 1000+ updates) and looking at static pictures.

Screenshot of my earlier entry Daily Reads displaying my daily reading list.

Go-to websites on my feed usually include The Daily Beast and Entertainment Weekly; that doesn't include the myriad of links on social media provided by the awesome people I follow on Twitter. (I love Twitter. Follow me on Twitter. You'll probably talk to more on Twitter than in real life).

 I spend the rest of my time surfing fashion blogs and feeding my inner sartorial whore; for looking up the latest fashion spreads, I have two go-to sites:

Fashion Gone Rogue

Fashion, whether you like it or not, is mostly a woman's world. FGR regularly posts up editorial spreads from every issue of Vogue, various catalogs, ad campaigns, and other magazines. High quality scans and compiled all in one place, it's like buying twenty magazines and flipping through without all the ugly advertisements and having the opportunity to compile, on your hard drive for personal use, all your favorite fashion images. As an amateur fashion illustrator, I love having an easy resource like this.

The Fashionisto

The Fashionisto is FGR's... brother site. Focusing on man candy male models, this site is the definitive place to find images of the elusive XY mannequin.  Mmmm... I think I'll leave this entry here. I've got boys to drool over homework to do.

Web Withdrawal

A few months ago, my laptop developed an interesting problem, namely, that various keys would and could not be pressed. For example, every time I wanted to type 'a,' I'd have to find the letter in some URL or text or go into Microsoft Word, click 'Insert,' click 'Symbol,' then hunt around for four seconds looking for the right 'a.'

I got by for many weeks just copying & pasting needed characters here and there, but when my dad borrowed my laptop, it became too much for him to do, and hence for the last five days and the next four, five days, I am bereft of my trusty, handy (heavy) portable computer to aid me in my horribly immense and whimsy consumption of Internet media until it gets shipped back from some mass repair center in Texas.

As the post title implies, I am suffering from some mild effects of withdrawal, although, as I am posting online (and surrounded by the thousands of computers available at the University of Michigan), I am not completely without access to the WWW. At this moment, my hand is cramping from typing this entire entry on an electronic device produced by a 'fruit company' invested in by Forrest Gump and smaller than an index card.

These miniature devices, while convenient & handy for Tweeting/microblogging/e-mail checks, are horrendous for anything of a larger scale. Long story short, I wish I had my laptop back, I am sorely addicted to checking my Twitter feed, and my thumbs hurt. :O

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'?