The Televised Tangle As a child, my mother always told me that watching television would turn my brain to “mush.” She only allowed a maximum of one hour of television a day. I was encouraged to play outside, or I was told to invent a game to play with my sister. My mother did not believe in using a television as a learning tool and ingrained that belief in me. However, in Steven Johnson’s “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” Johnson voices his own opinion on the matter. Steven Johnson is an author of several books and teaches journalism at New York University. He believes that as time progresses, television shows develop more complex plots and storylines. According to Johnson, television is becoming more complex and can be used as a learning tool; however, I believe that television is not developing valuable daily skills, that it is consuming children’s time, and that it is exposing children to unfit content. Watching television and being able to keep up with the storyline is not going to be a valuable skill in the real world. Johnson states, “They reduce the amount of analytic work you need to do to make sense of the story. All you have to do is follow the arrows. By this standard, popular television has never been harder to follow” (Johnson pg.285). In short, Johnson is referring to the increased complexity of television shows. While television shows may be getting more elaborate, being able to figure out what is going on in a show is not a skill that is going to prove beneficial in everyday life. Many children spend hours a day sitting in front of a television instead of doing other tasks that could be better for developing their bodies and minds. Johnson makes the comment that “Smart culture is no longer something you force your kids to ingest like green vegetables. It’s something you share” (Johnson pg. 294). Johnson is assuming that kids are watching television programs that are semi-educational. In reality kids minds are taken over by mindless television such as “Spongebob Squarepants.” Kids are sitting watching these shows instead of playing outside getting exercise in, or playing house and developing more of an imagination. My point is this: the television is doing all of the work for the child and doing nothing to make them think. Some of the content on television is inappropriate for young viewers. Johnson talks specifically about a television program called “24.” He talks about the intellectual depth of the program and only briefly touches on the controversial content such as graphic torture scenes and Muslim terrorism: “The episode that was shown on the twenty-fourth only fanned the flames higher: in one scene, a terrorist enlists a hitman to kill his child for not fully supporting the jihadist cause…” (Johnson pg. 278). Johnson is so focused on the intricate plot that he is not looking at the impolite and gruesome elements of the thread. Regardless of the plot’s difficulty, I believe the plots must be age appropriate. Some may say that it is the parent’s job to determine what a child watches, but I do not believe any kind of this inappropriate content should be encouraged. In other words, what I am trying to get at here is television gives children the opportunity to see inappropriate things that they would not otherwise be exposed to. In conclusion, television is not a tool that should be used to gain intelligence. Television is a source of entertainment and should be treated as one. Just because television is becoming more convoluted does not mean that it an educational resource. In the article “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” by Steven Johnson, Johnson shares his thoughts on how television is accelerating the intellectual ability of human beings. My thoughts differ; individuals are not gaining life skills from sitting in front of a television. Children are spending hours of their days watching programs on television, and sometimes being exposed to impolite content. Watching television is not making people smarter and the arguments saying that it does is incorrect.