Essay On Complexity Of Television

Complexity of the TV VS. The Viewer

One of the biggest entertainment that america follows today is the television, millions of programs have been written, and produced for not only entertainment but some also to education. There 's tons of channels that have specific kinds of shows, Animal Planet and History would have educational programs while channels such as MTV and Spike is more for just entertainment. Steven Johnson,a Journalist teacher at New York University and Author of Watching TV Makes You Smarter, expresses his ideas that over the years TV has gotten more complex and is actually healthy to watch. On the contrary Dana Stevens, a graduate with a Ph.D in comparative literature from the University of California, demands attention to the impact that television has on everyone. While both Authors Steven Johnson and Dana Stevens compare the effects that watching

Yet, according to Johnson “since the early 1980s, however, there has been a noticeable increase in narrative complexity in these dramas.”(281) He then goes on to tell about how earlier shows all followed a very simple structure that always repeated compared to today’s shows that follow more than one storyline that plays off each other, ultimately creating a complex story. He goes on to compare shows such as Starsky and Hutch, which are fairly simple, to A Hill Street Blues, that seem to be very complex. In response to Johnson’s article, Dana Stevens wrote the article Thinking Outside the Idiot Box, which she sarcastically announces that “like rats in a behaviorist 's maze, trained viewers can differentiate among up to 12 distinct plotlines in shows like The Sopranos.” (295) all the way through her article she discredits Johnson’s paper with many different examples. The complexity of the programs, she explains that viewers don’t account for the cognitive workout a program would have on them when picking their favorite