 "Photo: Paul Lachine / newsart.com")
Conventional wisdom holds that Americans are gradually getting dumber as a result of their culture. It's believed that movies and television, loaded with gratuitous sex and mindless violence, are eroding more than just standards of decency; they are numbing our brains to near extinction. And it seems that there is plenty to justify this argument. One could point to (gasp) Janet Jackson's breast being exposed to Super Bowl viewers or to the sight of contestants eating insects on prime-time as evidence of this trend.
The conservative commentator George Will best reflected this disgust with the supposed coarsening of society in a 2001 editorial in The Washington Post, "Ours is an age besotted with graphic entertainments," he wrote. "And in an increasingly infantilized society, whose moral philosophy is reducible to a celebration of 'choice,' adults are decreasingly distinguishable from children in their absorption in entertainments and the kinds of entertainments they are absorbed in - video games, computer games, hand-held games, movies on their computers, and so on. This is progress - more sophisticated delivery of stupidity."
Such thinking, however, is ignoring a trend indicating quite the opposite; while there are (to put it mildly) lewd elements in modern culture, on the whole, things are getting better and people are getting smarter. Steven Johnson, a young psychologist, has explored this phenomenon and his conclusions are fascinating.
"For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the 'masses' want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want," Johnson explained in his groundbreaking study Everything Bad Is Good For You. "But in fact, the exact opposite is happening; the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less."
Take the favorite bogeyman of politicians and parental groups, the videogame Grand Theft Auto. While I certainly wouldn't advocate that children play the game (which allows players to solicit prostitutes and kill police officers, among other things), it may not be as singularly bad as generally assumed. More than 1.6 million (mostly young) fans purchased the game's guidebook after it was released. Big deal, right? It deserves mention that the guidebook was 53,000 words and a couple hundred pages long. Granted, the content isn't exactly Proustian, but anytime that many young people get interested in reading it's a good thing.
Television, too, has made significant strides. Thirty years ago, simplistic sitcoms with linear plotlines like All in the Family or The Mary Tyler Moore Show were the norm. They have been supplanted by modern favorites like Seinfeld or The Simpsons, which feature a drastically higher degree of complexity. Seinfeld and The Simpsons both contain sophisticated humor, with esoteric analogies and intricate plot setups. Some episodes are intended to mirror the plot lines of classic movies; others are just designed with stunning intricacy, like the Seinfeld episode that runs backward.
This trend is hardly exclusive to television. Take many modern movies. Though there are plenty of horrendous films out there (this past summer's offerings provide ample evidence), there are also many thought provoking ones, like Pulp Fiction, The Usual Suspects, or Being John Malkovich. In short, for every Gigli there's an Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Perhaps most interestingly, these complex films and television shows exist in large part because of those same hated market forces that are said to be the reason behind idiotic programming like Fear Factor. Shows like Seinfeld are endlessly run in syndication. Jerry Seinfeld was earning close to $9 million an episode in the last season of Seinfeld. Since syndication, he's made hundreds of millions. It's not unusual for many Seinfeld fans to watch a given episode a dozen times and still find it funny. Thus, complexity is rewarded with profits.
Still, some concern is understandable. A survey conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts last year found that in 2002 (the most recent year data was available) fewer than half of Americans over 18 read a novel, short stories, plays, or poetry. Clearly, this is cause for alarm. No matter how intelligent movies, television, or video games may be becoming, they still will never be a substitute for a good book. But let's not be too hard on these new mediums.
After all, they could be worse.
Be the first to comment on this article!