HW # 14 Second Text

In the first excerpt the author is making the point that television is more passive than video games but that “there are degrees of passivity.” The author represents how movies/television shows have increased the amount of effort that a viewer needs to follow a show in order to grasp the more advanced and accelerated plots that didn’t exist 30 years ago. According to him, the best television shows demand more cognitive thinking, and for those shows have multiple threads going on like “West Wing” and “ER,” the audience has to use some analysis and “fill in,” to make sense of information “that has been either deliberately withheld or deliberately left obscure.” The arrival of multiple threading, the author says, began in the early 1980’s in show called the Hill Street Blues. Earlier shows consisted of one to two main characters actions around one plot and conclusion that could be followed by a monkey, that is, without effort.

In the second excerpt the author is trying to make the point that although he considers reading to be more important than playing video games, he thinks that we might not be judging the cognitive value of video games fairly. He goes on to describe certain incredibly complex games like Ultima that require book-like guides to be able to figure out how to get to the next level. One interesting thing he does is to ask us to pretend that video games came before books in our culture and to consider how books might be judged to be boring and one-dimensional compared to the excitement and variety of skills like memory and hand-eye coordination needed for a video game. He ends up by describing how frustrating and even painful these games can be.

My reaction to the first excerpt about television becoming less passive over the years because of more series having multiple threads is that like any arts entertainment, that is, movies or plays, there are ones that are more intellectually challenging than others. Some television shows are more complex than ones in the past, and some are not nearly as clever as earlier ones (thank god for reruns of “The Honeymooners” and “Mash.”). I have not seen “West Wing” or “ER,” but I like “House,” which has multiple threads. As for the author’s statement that television is more passive than video games, it is true that
with television there is not the hand-eye coordination and there is not the same kind of active quick mental and physical participation needed to control the action. The problem is that it is impossible to compare television as a whole to video games as a whole. There are television shows that are challenging on Channel 13. Sometimes there are adaptations from great books like Oliver Twist. There are documentaries on the civil war and the history of Jazz. There is also a lot of garbage like Tyler Perry shows.

My reaction to the second excerpt about trying to judge video games fairly, giving then credit for cognitive value, and just not comparing them negatively to reading is that I think what the negative comparison is all about is the amount of time kids spend on video games compared to the amount of time they spend reading. The thing is that playing video games like watching television and going to movies comes under the category of fun. Reading a book comes under the category of doing something that is good for you. The perspective that I think is missing is the need for humans to have “down” time from school and work. Personally, I think that playing sports is even better than video and television even though I like watching football on television and playing Madden 09 from time to time. I have not played many video games that are not sports-related, but I did once play a game called Shenmue, which had amazing graphics and an amazingly constructed story line. I probably did get more out of playing that game than watching most television shows because I was so involved in the story. Reading is incredibly important for the development of our minds as the author says, and is a predictor of success in life unlike watching TV and playing video games. No matter how frustrating videogames are, they are still more entertaining to most kids than reading a challenging book.

The author of these excerpts who is making a case that television requires more thinking than it used to and that videogames can be challenging to the mind and have more dimensions that reading seems to be going in a different direction than the author of the book Feed. This book is a kind of horror story about a future where everyone has all the technology of today, TY, the Internet, Ipods, web games, implanted in their brains. Reading is totally unnecessary, and so thinking is very limited. The book is a warning against spending too much of the day on the Internet, on Facebook, texting, and listening to Ipods and letting electronic devices rule your life, but it is mostly about corporate control of people who are totally dependent on electronic devices. Steven Johnson is trying to say that television shows and video games have some good qualities and require some thinking, but he also thinks reading is much more important and chooses to write a book to express his ideas instead of creating a video or a script for a TV show. M.T. Anderson’s characters don’t even watch good television shows or play challenging video games. They are just into instant messaging and shopping. Steven Johnson seems to be giving some perspective on what can be positive about some forms of popular culture, but M.T. Anderson is giving perspective on what can happen if there is too much dependence on the Internet for information so that we don’t have to think anymore let alone read.