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April 25, 2005

Who says TV rots your brain?

According to the New York Times Magazine, an episode of 24 lasts 44 minutes - a real-time hour, minus 16 minutes for commercials [so maybe it should really be called, let's see, 15 1/2]- connects the lives of 21 distinct characters, each with a clearly defined "story arc", as the Hollywood jargon has it: a defined personality with motivations and obstacles and specific relationships with other characters.

They're woven [and we're pretty sure you can blame Dramatica Pro for this] through nine primary narrative threads, each drawing extensively upon events and information revealed in earlier episodes. The rest of you might be on the couch, but according to Steven Johnson, your brain is undergoing such a workout that it probably needs a couple of chapters of War and Peace just to relax.

For decades, we've worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a path declining steadily toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the "masses" want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies try to give the masses what they want. But as that 24 episode suggests, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less.

Thus we're introduced to the Sleeper Curve, "the single most important new force altering the mental development of young people today". And while the mass media torments itself worrying that television is mindless escapism promoting addiction, violence, and made consumer spending, we might actually be raising a generation of terribly clever people who are completing informal degrees at a sort of prime-time university.

Posted by cw at April 25, 2005 07:49 PM

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