Cognition

After reading the excerpt given to us on Friday, I have a few thoughts to share.  There are plenty of inter-woven issues pressing the entire world at this very moment, complete with dynamic characters and twisting plot line.  People watch TV to be entertained first and foremost.  When I get ready for a much anticipated movie or television show, I smoke a joint. I don't do a sudoku to warm my brain up for some real thinking time.  I sure as hell don't watch the screen for any kind of actual intellectual stimulation.  I imagine the only reason people enjoy these "multi-threaders" is because, to quote the great Ernest Borgnine in Baseketball, "People today have attention spans that can only be measured in nano-seconds."  They start a new scene with pretty new faces every couple minutes because that is what it takes to keep people from flipping the channel.  Shows are made to do your thinking for you.  How much personal emotion you decide to throw into watching them, however, is entirely up to you.

Red Dwarf is a late 80's/early 90's British science-fiction sitcom which provides a wonderful escape from all that heavy thinking about Tony Soprano's latest contribution to the East River.  It features four main characters: a human (maybe the last in existence), an android created to serve humans, a hologram of a dead human and a humanoid derived from 3 million years of the isolated evolution of the common house cat.  They are stuck 3 million light-years away from Earth and, consequently, 3 million years into the future.  Their journey home takes them on 8 seasons of strange and laughable adventures, each more ridiculous than the last.  And my favorite feature of the show, it can be enjoyed while engaging in any number of additional activities.  The activities may include, but are not limited to:  doing homework, cleaning, making a playlist, folding laundry or managing finances.  Of course, if you can enjoy the dry silliness that is British humor, the show is entertaining enough as a solo activity.  The show tells a story for a half an hour and then rolls the credits. 

It makes me cringe to think of how many people will die without knowing how to navigate a newspaper, while being able to recount the plot of Lost in its entirety.  People will watch the news for thirty minutes, watching everything a station wants you to know for an average of 30 seconds a story.  People will not pick up a newspaper for thirty minutes to read the full story of whatever the please.  The personal pursuit of knowledge without some kind of finger pointing the way.  I'm with Mike Judge's Idiocracy; people seem quite content with letting Hollywood guide their cognition.  If you have doubts, take a look at the Science-Fiction Channel's new name and logo (It's SyFy, just for the record).