HW #14

The First excerpt of the two short ones focuses on television and the advancement television has made on an intellectual level. The author gives you a basic history of what t.v was like in the 80's and prior to that. He explains that all television shows before the big change in t.v were extremely simple and required no thinking. There was one or two characters you had to follow and only one problem or "thread" to follow in every episode. He noted how some t.v shows would even have arrows explaining little things to help the viewer understand things that were pretty obvious. He goes on to give more examples of how simple and straight forward television shows were. He then explains how the show "Hill Street Blues" changed t.v in the future and made it slightly more interactive with the viewer. The difference between "hill street blues is that it had more than one "thread" as the author called it and made you think about what was going on and connect the shows to previous shows. Then he explains how modern shows advanced on this idea and made shows even more complicated and required more thinking to follow them. He explains how shows such as the sopranos follow the lives of many characters and require you to think about the connection of the show your watching and previous episodes. His major point is that although t.v is passive the level of passivity is better then before and it actually does require quite a bit of thinking.

The second excerpt talks about video games and relates video games to books. He does not believe video games are better then books but he does believe video games have their benefits. He goes deeper than just saying that a video game improves your hand eye coordination he argues that video games are very complex and obviously interactive and they do have you thinking more than many people who don't play video games realize. He explains that video games are so complex that many times you need books to complete them and he argues that video games do require some thinking and "improve your visual intelligence and your manual dexterity." He then goes on to explain that many people get too caught up in video games spending hundreds of dollars on them and many times not even having fun while playing them because they are so complex and frustrating. He then questions why do we play if they are so frustrating. He gives two non-traditional arguments of how video games help us and hurt us.

I think both perspectives are accurate because they point out that although many people are against t.v and video games and they do distract us they also do have benefits. They make these arguments with out going to the extreme and saying they are good to us. The author in the first excerpt about t.v refers to a "level of passivity" which is crucial in his argument because it shows he is not arguing that t.v is not passive but merely that it is less passive then it previously was. The idea that t.v requires no thinking is disproved in this passage. He goes in to detail on how the plots of new shows are very complex and require you to fill in the blanks and think about many different things at once to be able to follow these shows well.

In the second excerpt the author clearly states that he believes books are better for your mind that video games are. He then goes on to argue that video games are not all that passive and do require work and improve your "visual intelligence." He does not go as far as saying that video games are the best thing for you but he simply explains they can possibly benefit you in some ways. He also points out that the frustrate you and can stress you out and in many ways are worse for you then good for you. These arguments are not that different but they go deeper than most and explain that t.v and video games aren't all bad although they may mostly be bad.

These two excerpts although not completely, do contradict feed. Feed main point is basically that all this digitalization going on in our world is bad and only bad things will come from it and if we keep doing what we are doing we are headed towards the destruction of our society and the individualism that we have right now, even it may not be that much. These passages basically say, yeah this stuff may not be the best thing for us but its not completely bad there are some good points to it. They contradict Feed by pointing out how these things help us or ways they possibly could help us. But I don't think either author would disagree with the general idea of Feed.