edit: It seems I've been beaten to the punch in forming an opinion, to which I will rebut
Good morning blues said:
Television is a bad thing. It doesn't have to be, but it is. Television programming is a wasteland of bland, vacant, and socially regressive tripe. There are clearly exceptions, but the majority of television is absolute trash that does have ill effects on people, whether it's simple changes, such as the fact that people who watch a lot of TV perceive much more crime in the world than actually exists and therefore support worthless law and order policies, or more severe changes, such as the fact that heavy TV watching has been associated with Alzheimer's.
xmetatr0nx said:
historybuff said:
It's certainly not evil. Though I don't watch a lot of it.
There's some great stuff on the History channel (sometimes, when they feel like showing it instead of those strange Monster Quest marathons) and the Travel channel. And comedy central, of course.
This. There are a ton of awesome and informative channels that fascilitate higher learning. I myself really dont watch too much of the tely but when i do its usually one of those channels.
TV *itself* fuels higher learning. It's "making us smarter" so to speak. Allow me to elaborate: Take shows (of the same sort) and compare them today. Police procedural vs cop dramas of today, with things like The Wire (shameless plug. If you haven't seen The Wire, then you are missing out on THE best show in a long long time). Reality shows, the much-maligned "crap" of today even are making us smarter. years ago the equivalent to the reality show was the game show, like Wheel of Fortune. In those days everyone knew all the rules and how things worked; the only variable was who'd win / how much / etc. Nowadays the standard is the prize (sometimes) and the variables are all the rules and hoops you have to jump through. It is making us cognitively smarter, having to juggle different "threads" of plot. Going back to the first example of cop shows, there was at most about 5 people Those Two Guys who were the heroes, their boss, a couple support characters. (I mean recurring, not from episode to episode)In the shows of today, there are Loads and Loads of Characters in almost all of the shows, and the depth to which they go is quantum physics compared to yesterdays algebra. :3 In yesterday's show, it has an introduction, a case, conclusion, mayb ea two-parter that took a while to do. Today's show (stuff like The Wire, it's younger brother The Shield, etc. You have to juggle 5 - 10 different plot points / threads per episode and keep them all straight, and they're all (possibly) interconnected) I'm not saying it's Shakespeare; I'm not saying it does or doesn't have depth, metaphor and commentary on the human condition, simply that it is MORE COMPLEX and thus requires more attention to detail and management (and levels of potential interaction (about said show, etc) than yesterday. For more on this see the book: Everything Bad is Good for You: How Popular Media is Making us Smarter.
edit #2, just a small note on the "thinking there's more crime than there really is and law and order policies" point that was made. This is called the recollection bias - things easier to think of will be more prone to be listed. For instance, if you asked which happens more, fire in your home, plane crash, or a robbery, people would say plane crash, fire, robbery (generally) because that's what we can see and observe, what they focus on. This isn't a problem with *TV ITSELF* it is a problem with the news media in general. You're far more likely to be robbed or what have you than die in a plane crash, but they don't do any stories on that because it's commonly occurring, but when a plane crash happens, it's big news.
