Thinking Outside Of The Idiot Box Analysis

In the world we live in today, everyone has an opinion on what’s going on, rather it’s a news reporter, magazine blog, social media or maybe it’s just journalists. Everything argues upon “they say” versus what “I say”, which is extremely significant because everyone’s opinion is effective to someone. Likewise, in the two articles, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” and “Thinking Outside of the Idiot Box”, both the authors created arguments on whether television makes you “smarter”, or not.

In the article, “Watching TV Makes You Smarter”, the author, Steve Johnson, argues that television is significant to the brain. Johnson aims this article towards youth so they can have this “reality-check” of what they are watching. Johnson proposed the idea

In fact, Dana suggested that watching television doesn’t make you any smarter. Stevens argues that the show “24” Steven Johnson referred to had a few relatively negative impressions from the shows illustration of Muslim terrorists and how the show ratifies distress. Dana also interprets that this issue could be secluded from having any idea of gaining knowledge and, in reality, it’s just racial profiling. Though, Dana disagrees with Steven throughout the article he ends it with an interesting neutral statement saying, “the medium seems neither like a brain-liquefying poison nor a salutary tonic. Certainly, for young children, who are fresh meat for the advertising industry, the idea of a week (or an entire childhood) without TV makes a lot of sense. But shouldn 't men and women be trusted to judge their own dosages, just as they would decide on the number of drinks they can handle at the bar? And shouldn 't we choose our favorite shows because we like them, not because they force our otherwise helpless cortexes to "manage resources" and "recognize long-term patterns"?”. Dana uses this as a claim to infer that people should be the decision makers to what they want to learn and not just assume that television will make us