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Quote by: Muckraker  The first few weeks of American Idol puts mentally ill and ugly people on display so the millions of viewers can laugh as each night presents us with uglier and crazier people than the previous night. |
I have often found myself wondering about the mental illnesses of the Idol castoffs. Clearly, some of them exhibit signs of Aspergers or other socialization-type diseases, if not merely tone-deafness.
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Shows like Jackass and South Park are also well received by audiences.
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Now, Jackass I can't speak to. But the fact that South Park is well received by audiences is a credit to our intelligence - it's one of the smartest-written shows ever. Biting satire which, i might add, often focuses on the exact problem we are speaking of here - the 4 boys the show focuses on are the voices of reason in a town (and sometimes a world) of idiots.
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But there will always be readers, and to claim that people who don't read are lumped in with all the other uneducated idiots in the world is incredibly shortsighted. There are other options for the acquisition of information in modern times. One hundred years ago, there were not many other options and yet many people still did not read when it was one of the only options for gaining knowledge.
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Absolutely. It's as shortsighted as thinking that people who read great works of literature are somehow more educated - there are different forms of intelligence, and there is nothing wrong with being intelligent in areas other than knowledge of literature.
I think that's what's really going on here. There is simply more information available in the world - a lot more. People triage the information that is important, and the bottom line is that, for many people, being able to point to the UK on a map is less important than being able to point to a chart of last month's sales figures.
And let's not act like the phenomenon is limited to Americans. We are, as world leaders, easy targets for such surveys and studies. I would venture to say that many developed nations are in similar situations.