Question

DIRECTIONS:

[1] Read each of the following “PASSAGES” below, and read the boldfaced quote or paraphrase below each “PASSAGE.”

[2] Edit the boldfaced quote or paraphrase by:

* Adding quotation marks

* Inserting ellipses

* Inserting square brackets

* Adding a citation.

AND/OR

* Fixing the punctuation.

PASSAGE: “But another kind of televised intelligence is on the rise. Think of the cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, the parsing of narrative threads. Over the half-century, programming on TV has increased the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. This growing complexity involves three primary elements: multiple threading, flashing arrows and social networks.” — “Watching TV Makes You Smarter” by Steven Johnson (280)

1. Steven Johnson argues that watching television has the same “cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading: attention, patience, retention, and the parsing of narrative threads.” Johnson claims that watching TV makes people smarter by “increasing the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties (280)”.

PASSAGE: “If watching TV really makes you smarter, as Steven Johnson argued in an article in yesterday's New York Times Magazine (an excerpt from his forthcoming book) then I guess I need to watch a lot more of it, because try as I might, I could make no sense of Johnson's piece.”

— “Thinking Outside the Idiot Box” by Dana Stevens (295)

2. However, Dana Stevens disagrees with Johnson: “if watching TV really makes you smarter, then I guess I need to watch a lot more of it, because I could make no sense of Johnson's piece.” (Stevens 295).

PASSAGE: “Not only does Johnson fail to account for the impact of the 16 minutes' worth of commercials that interrupt any given episode of, say, 24 (a show he singles out as particularly 'nutritional'), but he breezily dismisses recent controversies about the program's representation of Muslim terrorists or its implicit endorsement of torture, preferring to concentrate on how the show's formal structure teaches us to 'pay attention, make inferences, track shifting social relationships.”

— “Thinking Outside the Idiot Box” by Dana Stevens (296)

3. Some television programs, like 24, can be seen, at one level, as pro-torture propaganda.

PASSAGE: “And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.”

— “Is Google Making Us Stupid” by Nicholas Carr

4. I agree that “the Internet seems to be chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation” because I too find that I often have a tendency to merely skim the surface levels of online news articles.

PASSAGE: “Current opinion now routinely echoes the mythical 19th-century machine destroyer Ned Ludd, warning in a growing avalanche of books, academic theses, market forecasts, and op-eds that technology is leading us to a world of mass unemployment, that it is creating a newly idle lumpenproletariat, and that we had better put in place a universal basic income (UBI), under which the state cuts a check to everyone, regardless of their income or work status, if we are to have any hope of avoiding mass unrest.”

— “In Defense of Robots” by Robert D. Atkinson

Robert D. Atkinson is skeptical of Neo-Luddites who worry that the rise of artificial intelligence will result in a world of mass unemployment and mass unrest which can only be offset by government policies that put in place a universal basic income guaranteed to all citizens

Answer 1

1. Steven Johnson argues that watching television has the same cognitive benefits conventionally ascribed to reading,attention, patience, retention and the parsing of narrative threads. Johnson claims that watching TV makes people smarter by increasing the demands it places on precisely these mental faculties. 2. However Dana Stevens disagrees with Johnson, “If watching TV really makes you smarter, then I guess I need to watch a lot more of it, because I could make no sense of Johnson's piece.” 3. Some television programs like 24 can be seen at one level as pro-torture propaganda. 4. I agree that the "Internet seems to be chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation" because I too find that I often have a tendency to merely skim the surface levels of online news articles.   

5. Robert D. Atkinson is skeptical of Neo-Luddites who worry that the "Rise of artificial intelligence will result in a world of mass unemployment and mass unrest" which can only be offset by government policies that put in place a universal basic income guaranteed to all citizens.