Is Pop Culture Good For You?

 

When it comes down to the question of "is pop culture good for you?" I feel as though pop culture is not only good for us, but its good at teaching things in a way that keeps you interested. As Steven Johnson argues, pop culture has actually done a good job at exercising their audience's mental functions that are important for everyday life. An example used by Steven Johnson is 'The Sopranos', and how complex plot threads can get; the audience is forced to keep track of all the different flashbacks and present day events because it is vital for understanding the characters in order to follow along with the story. Put simply, by directly interacting with an audience like this; including them/immersing them in the experience, making them play detective, they are training their cognitive functions without realizing. People have argued that modern day media isn't as intelligent as older media, because it depicts more violence and gritty realities. Steven argues against this, however, by stating "With many shows that we associate with "quality" entertainment [...] the intelligence arrives fully formed in the words and actions of the characters on-screen. They say witty things to one another and avoid lapsing into tired sitcom clichés [...] enjoying the company of these smart people. But assuming we're bright enough to understand the sentences they're saying, there's no intellectual labor involved in enjoying the show as a viewer. [...] The intellectual work is happening on-screen, not off". Despite how vulgar modern media may seem, pop culture in this form makes the audience work for their entertainment, forcing them to think hard about details, and the reward is getting more episodes and a fulfilling show.

Steven Johnson has given a name to this exercising of cognitive functions as 'The Sleeper Curve', he uses an example by stating "[...] to make sense of an episode of 24, you have to integrate far more information than you would have a few decades ago [...] The culture is getting more cognitively demanding, not less". Not only does it enhance cognitive functions, but smarter audiences want smarter shows; it encourages media to be more clever with their plots and the kinds of stories they want to tell. The consensus that media is getting dumber and, therefore, making people dumber is very inaccurate because the total opposite is happening. As media proves how well-crafted it can be, it makes audiences desire more thought-provoking entertainment and forces media to not be lazy but, in fact, work even harder at keeping an audiences attention. Steven compares the difference between older shows, socially deemed intelligent, and modern shows. I feel that the best word to describe this overall phenomenon is "enhancing", because so many different elements are getting enhanced through this type of storytelling in media. Audiences are benefitting cognitively by enhancing their mind skills, media outlets enhance their entertainment and by doing so enhance the growth of viewers and creates and endless beneficial cycle for everyone.

We can actually see the way audiences force and encourage media do improve their quality through the vast amounts of film and media critics there are online. As modern media proved how skilled it is, and audiences' taste for entertainment becomes more refined, more and more people have become passionate on analyzing media and sharing their knowledge with others. If a particular film, song album, series etc. is deemed poor and could be better, an audience will simply not support it. This negatively impacts media outlets and therefore forces them to do better in order not to suffer from poor ratings and boycotts in mass volumes. By creating smarter audiences they have made smarter critics as well, and now people know what they want, and using the internet as their voice, proudly exclaim when they are pleased or unsatisfied. For example, the 2020 'Sonic the Hedgehog' movie had gotten massive backlash for it's CGI design of the main character. When audiences saw the way Sonic had looked in the first trailer, they were very upset and for a long time had demanded the design be modified otherwise they would refuse to see the movie. The reaction was so strong that the distributer, Paramount Pictures, had announced they would extend the release date, originally November of 2019, to February of 2020 in order to fix Sonic's design. This is an excellent example that audiences are not getting dumber through media because, in fact, media has made audiences smart enough with the type of entertainment they consume, let alone enhancing their cognitive abilities of memory, forming conclusions, and other vital puzzle-solving skills.