Why is television bad for your mind but reading is good for it?
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Why is television bad for your mind but reading is good for it?
Why is television bad for your mind but reading is good for it?
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reading requires more cognition, simple as.
in television you are spoonfed media with the sole objective of getting you to buy things, and every single person who tries to sell you something, from your town marketplace up to big corporations, has to second guess what you may like - that is, has to treat you AS IF they knew what you want. Their aim is always to give you what (they think) you already know you want. The seller always sees you as an idiot: you are a giant human baby, we know what you want, here's a product that appeals to your basest desires! This is also why everything you see on television is inherently regressive: it is produced through marketing research based on what you already want, so it's impossible for television (or market) to ever actually sell you something "new". Ideally, a seller would like you to be hooked forever to the same shitty product, and trends only ever change by absorbing, implementing, stupidifying, re-packaging and re-selling some element of novelty emerging from natural human interactions, underground art scenes, or just individual creativity - but novelty, as you hear a million times over, is always met with skepticism. So television is not only bad for your mind, because it never challenges you, but it is intentionally bad, it intentionally, knowlingly and voluntarily tries to make you stupider at any given moment, by treating you as if you were already stupid and never openly proposing a challenging novelty to you.
Novelty is what you get from literature and art. Literature and art in general does the exact opposite of this, if done well: it engages with you by proposing something complex and new, and it never assumes that this is "too difficult" for you, or that "the masses don't want stuff this complex" or other disgustingly paternalistic remarks aimed at making you a product-addicted monkey for the rest of your life. The good artist always proposes his work to you thinking that you might be his peer in engaging with the complexity he has produced, or that you might become his peer. He challenges you, and has a conversation with you - he does not talk you down like a parents giving you advice or giving you things (products) to consoom "for your own good". The artist trusts that you can figure out by yourself what your own good is.
I don't think art is medium dependent. I would agree that there are more good books out there than good TV shows. Look at a show like Severence versus any book by Collen Hoover. In that case, the book is more damaging to your mind.
I would echo what has already been said about passive entertainment active entertainment. People who read develop a skill in reading which id transferable to jobs, research ect. Watching TV doesn't develop any skills. Hell, videogames are a better hobby than TV. It at least involves problem solving skills at least
It's easier to detect bullshit in books because they require a lunch more active mode of cognition and can be parsed repeatedly and in any order.
Passive entertainment vs active entertainment.
IQ starts dropping whenever television is introduced into a community.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/smi.2460040110
>active entertaintment
Vidyachads cant stop winnung
Television is a much more intense experience overall and the pacing is not completely dictated by the viewer. Television is bad for the very same reason a man is akin to a lowly beast during sex.
If you wrote in an advertisement after ever chapter in a book, would you take it seriously? Television isn’t a serious medium.
The medium is the message
Many reasons:
1. Propaganda Apparatus vs Truth Seeking Process
2. Involuntary selection of content vs conscious selection of content
3. Vision stimuli vs higher cognition
4. Systemic symbolism for domestication vs revolutionary symbolism for differentiation.
5. Controllable medium by select corporations vs decentralized medium difficult to fully control.
6. Contemporary medium (<100 yr lifetime) vs eternal medium (1000s of years of lifetime).
7. Broadcasting antichrist messaging vs Eternal Logos Revelation.
Television is eating cheetos. Reading is going to the gym.
The television is porn. The reading is sex. You have to choose, anons. The television is selling you something as others pointed out. The reading is giving you that. For personal reasons, I have become anti-visual mediums. To play (or participate) means you have become a part of the discourse and the narrative and you lost.
it depends on the tv shows, the books, and whatever minds are being exposed.....
Your argument is so centrist and cowardly.
and accurate too
Even a lesser book is always better than a good show.
documentaries are better than springer
that being said, generally books > tv
hungry hungry caterpiller isn't going to be much more intellectually stimulating than watching good film.
Shut up, extremist. The centre will hold.
depends on what you read and on what you watch,numbnuts
Read DFW.
Reading makes the mind create imagery. TV presents the image for you. That's about the gist of it.
Reading engages the logical and creative aspects of the brain. On the one hand you are processing the information, and on the other hand your brain is making sense of the information through various images. Television is a passive activity. It does not need much thought or intention to get something out of it.
it wasn't that long ago, in the grand scheme of things, that novel reading was considered a source of moral and intellectual decay. TV is more extreme, but consuming any kind of fiction carries the same risk.
>but consuming any kind of fiction carries the same risk
Then what are we to do? I remember that Poetry was the superior art. So should be drop all the fiction and just consume poetry? Or if not that, as i may be misconstruing your point, then what else to do?
just be very mindful of what fiction you read. don't read something just because it's "essential" or "/lit/core" or "universally acclaimed". don't spend excessive amounts of time reading fiction just to have something to do. don't read things that are at odds with your values, even if you can find some kind of aesthetic value or objective merit in them. read with the explicit aim of finding things that are good and edifying
Indeed.
There was an episode of "The Twilight Zone" about this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Enough_at_Last
Television requires passive consumption, a short attention span, the content quality is low, and excessive watching interferes with sleep patterns, leading to cognitive and health issues.
Reading requires active engagement, it expands your vocabulary, and it improves memory, concentration, and analytical abilities.
Television does the imagining for you.
Imagination. TV requires almost zero imagination, everything is represented as-is. At most, you can consider symbolism or a deeper message, but most TV purposely avoids including these things. Reading, on the other hand, requires the major application of imagination, and the best literature has many levels of symbolism, metaphor, or some kind of deeper meaning to uncover. One expands the mind, one narrows it.
Excellent point. Same reason why adaptations from books to TV/movies are always wores