I get a perverse pleasure from Steven Johnson's arguments about TV being more complex today, and that this makes TV viewers smarter (see New York Times piece, here). His argument conflates the notion of complex plotlines -- more characters and scene jumping -- with viewers getting smarter. But I think that he is missing the point: it's not intelligence, per se, that is being stretched through these mental gymnastics, but instead, the same sort of situational awareness and attention shifting that goes on with serious video gamers. Intelligence is about making judgements, and reasoning, rather than being able to keep track of which shell the pea is under. On the other hand, increasing situational awareness and inculcating a predisposition toward Continuous Partial Attention is a requirement for surviving in the modern world, so I shouldn't knock increasingly complex TV, although I avoid watching it myself. Still, I buy into some of his premises:

The kids are forced to think like grown-ups: analyzing complex social networks, managing resources, tracking subtle narrative intertwinings, recognizing long-term patterns. The grown-ups, in turn, get to learn from the kids: decoding each new technological wave, parsing the interfaces and discovering the intellectual rewards of play. Parents should see this as an opportunity, not a crisis. Smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest, like green vegetables. It's something you share.

Still and again, the days of huddling around the TV to receive a daily dose of mediated culture from the analog media moguls are numbered. Digital media will absorb TV and other analog media, and that's when we will really see smart TV: when TV can be socialized like blogs, when the shows are not mass-produced reality nonsense, but real people videoing their own lives, telling their own stories, and when we finally walk away from the constraints of mass markets. Internet TV will be something completely different.

[pointer from David Weinberger]