Name : Irfan Budi Satria

ARTICLE REVIEW 2

Name : Irfan Budi Satria

Student Number: 1606908312

Faculty & Class: Engineering - Bahasa Inggris

Title of Article:“Is pop culture dumbing us down or smartening us up?”
Author: Malcolm Gladwell (ofThe NewYorker)

Is Pop Culture Dumbing Us Down or Smartening Us Up?

Sometimes we may feel that we became smarter after watching an episode of a T.V. program, or feel that we learn something new by playing video games. To this day it is still debated whether or not popular culture (pop culture) and entertainment media can make one’s cognitive mind smarter. Has the rapid exposure to television, video games, and movies replaced literary works and books’ place in providing insight and intellect, and raising general knowledge?

Published under the “Brain Candy” segment in The New Yorker Magazine in 2005, author Malcom Gladwell analyzes the correlation between pop culture and how it affects our intellect, taking reference from a book by Steven Johnson, titled “Everything Bad is Good for You”. Johnson pointed out a notable factor to this phenomenon. observation in the content of the television programs. Television in some thirty years ago is very different in content to how it is now. A typical TV serial nowadays is very rich in plot and fast in pacing compared to a top-rated show in the 1970s. Current TV serials or dramas are designed with audience engagement in mind, stimulating the cognitive mind to process stories, events, and characters. And considering how accessible TV is to everyone now, it is safe to assume that the general audience are surely benefited some knowledge, even if a little. The same can be said to video games, as they evolved in their purpose from being purely leisure, into cinematic, thought-provoking experiences requiring critical thinking from the player in making decisions and crafting strategies inside the game world.

Gladwell informs readers of the opportunity of learning pop culture provides, explicitly stating the type of learning provided by television and video games differ from that of books: an academic textbook provides explicit learning, while video games provide collateral learning, a type of learning highly associated with problem solving and how to do specific tasks, training logical thinking along the way.

In conclusion,pop culture media, while cannot be a direct substitute for books as they provide a different kind of learning method, is now the most accessible way for people to enrich their minds with new information, inadvertently raising our general intellect and insight of things. Pop culture did not lose its purpose as leisure, but rather, gained a new function that is to smarten people up. As time goes on, they will be even more associated to each other.

My personal remark on the article is how it impacts me in a particular way. To start with, the rise of pop culture content quality has been personally experienced by myself, being an avid video game player, that modern video games have significantly thicker substance and more complex controls compared to those just a decade ago. A modern video game can take as much as fifty-plus hours to complete, clearly giving an example of the depth of the plot, some of which need a relatively high level of intellect to understand. Gladwell’s writing encouraged me to delve deeper into the topic and further realizing the learning opportunity provided by video games, and popular culture media in general.