Pamela Parker

Malcolm Gladwell writes in the New Yorker about media literacy and sophistication, and their effect on IQ. It’s a review of the new book, “Everything Bad is Good for You” by Stephen Johnson.

I think my New Yorker subscription has lapsed but I’ve been too busy to even follow up on it lately. Anyway, here’s a little from the fascinating Gladwell review:

As Johnson points out, television is very different now from what it was thirty years ago. It’s harder. A typical episode of “Starsky and Hutch,” in the nineteen-seventies, followed an essentially linear path: two characters, engaged in a single story line, moving toward a decisive conclusion. To watch an episode of “Dallas” today is to be stunned by its glacial pace—by the arduous attempts to establish social relationships, by the excruciating simplicity of the plotline, by how obvious it was. A single episode of “The Sopranos,” by contrast, might follow five narrative threads, involving a dozen characters who weave in and out of the plot. Modern television also requires the viewer to do a lot of what Johnson calls “filling in,” as in a “Seinfeld” episode that subtly parodies the Kennedy assassination conspiracists, or a typical “Simpsons” episode, which may contain numerous allusions to politics or cinema or pop culture.

UPDATE: Rushkoff on Johnson