Got a blog tip? Contact us

« Leslie Stahl in 1984 | Main | This street is my street »

More on watching television

Wired magazine asks: Why are IQ scores rising around the globe? The story is by Steven Johnson, the same guy who wrote Why Television Makes You Smarter (which we discussed here and here). Both pieces reflect the arguments Johnson makes in his new book, Everything Bad Is Good for You.

I found the Wired story interesting, but don't buy it. Even if we accept that IQ is a viable measure of intelligence; that the different IQ tests created over time measure the same quantity; that the tests are implemented objectively, with samples representative of the population at large, there are problems with Johnson's argument. For one, he oversimplifies the IQ findings (New Scientist, 3/2/02) and overstates his case. As Johnson acknowledges, the significant leaps in IQ scores are found mostly in a certain kind of problem solving: one measuring visuo-spatial relationships. Researchers point to a number of possible explanations for the changes in IQ, but Johnson ignores those. He also ignores all countervailing data (for instance, the fact that the same researchers have found *declining* IQs in industrial nations over the past five years), and attributes all positive changes to media use.

My main problem with the article, though, isn't in the details but with the suggestion that we should "Stop reading the great authors and start playing Grand Theft Auto."

Though it may surprise a few of you, I don't doubt that TV has helped us improve our faculty for visuo-spatial relationships. My concern is that by shifting our attention from the page to the screen -- by watching more than we read -- we are losing more than we gain. Obviously, television does some things better than print. If you want to teach people how to tie a Windsor knot, showing a video beats handing out written instructions, which would make a relatively straightforward task seem like a confusing, complicated exercise.

But what about philosophy? Which medium better prepares us to understand, I dunno, utilitarianism? Or tort reform, intellectual property law, or biochemistry?  Reading and writing help us acquire the ability to reason, to analyze arguments, and to spot errors in truth and reason. Television is not only inferior for communicating complex ideas, it works against them.

I remember watching the first Bush/Gore debate with several friends in 1999 and all of us felt that Bush won. Gore came off like a real tightass: patronizing, uncomfortable, fake. Bush was a guy's guy, someone you'd enjoying chatting up, even if you disagree with his politics (and all of us did). Months later, I read a transcript of the same debate and was blown away by how different it seemed. Gore responded to questions in complete sentences; he stated his positions and supported them with clear, salient evidence; he pointed out contradictions in Bush's platform without succumbing to the easy impulse to "go negative." Bush, in contrast, repeatedly dodged questions by turning them around and by mouthing lines from stump speeches. He demonstrated shockingly little grasp of the issues and spoke robotically in stock phrases ("from the heart," "uniter not a divider," etc.)

Seeing this on TV, I failed to notice the substance of the debate; my experience is far from unique. It's now taken for granted that tan and handsome JFK trumped sweaty, stubbly Nixon in an infamous televised debate, but what is often left out is that the majority of people who listened to the debate on the radio thought Nixon won.

And remember John Kerry? Part of the reason he lost the election was his inability to conquer television. By making nuanced, complicated arguments, he set himself up to charges of flip-flopping. It's like that old Nickelodeon tagline: You can't do that on television. And the reason you can't do that lies partly in the commercial nature of the medium, but, more fundamentally, in its syntax.

Words and sentences allow us to state explicitly the relationship between things. We can say, for example, "I'm not going to support that campaign finance bill, even though I support campaign finance reform, because that bill will prevent real reform from ever passing."  Or, "If elected, I'll help keep jobs in America by getting rid of loopholes in the tax code that allow US corporations to operate taxfree offshore." On televsion, such statements are reduced to "He is against campaign finance reform" and "My opponent will raise taxes."

Words allow us to specify cause and effect; to state something's relationship to the past or future; to distinguish potentialities from possibilities and probabilities. There's really no way to do this with images; unlike connecting words and sentences, the relationship between images is vague and open-ended. A screen may show and woman crying and then cut to a man on the phone at work. Viewers make assumptions about the connection (romantic relationship? sexual harrassment?), assumptions that have gotten easier over time, as producers have established certain conventions... but there is no "propositional syntax" equivalent to print. (Television includes language, of course, but it is first and foremost a visual medium.)

Television's vagueness, far from being a hindrance, is actually its strength. Television is, after all, primarily an engine for advertising and selling, and advertising relies on the power of suggestion. Companies would sell a lot fewer goods if they had to rely on words. If, instead of showing images of handsome, sultry men, the the makers of Viagra stated outright, "our drug will make you sexy," they'd sell a lot less of it, because the language would ring false. We don't process images in the same way. We don't see an image and think, "Is this true?" or "Does this support the claim?"

* * *

What annoys me most about this whole debate is the way it's framed, as if Johnson and the Wired set are proposing something radical or transgressive. Nothing could be further from the truth. Their problem is, what again? People aren't abandoning the great authors for Grand Theft Auto fast enough for them? There's a powerful, "great author" cartel holding pop culture down?

Face it, the people promoting reading habits and advocating limits on the time children spend with electronic media are pretty well marginalized. The only reason to promote television any further than it already it is to make the people who feel guilty about watching feel better about it and themselves. Everything Is Bad for You is self-help disguised as science.

Let's remember that the blog world itself is largely populated by technophiles. Some of the concerns I've expressed about television barely scratch the surface of what you can find in books; the ideas of important thinkers such as Neil Postman are essentially absent online.

So, anyway, I think I'll end this with a plug for Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Postman is extremely unpopular with the technorati, who tag him as neo-Luddite (which, after all, he was). But Postman is one of my heroes. If you pick up the book, think of him as a kindly old man who may hate your music and your TV shows but who nonetheless has a lot to teach us.