post-summer break post

i'm reading "everything bad is good for you" where the author explains the work an audience member puts in to follow modern television shows (even reality TV), the mental work and skill it takes to play video games, the mental work to learn new programs on a computer and on the web. essentially he's claiming that everything demonized by modern media sources as dumbing down americans, is actually making us work harder for our entertainment. what i found particularly poignant is a reference he makes to blogs as the proof that there is mental work outside of entertainment. johnson says "these diaries [meaning blogs] are, after all, frequently created by juveniles. But thirty years ago those juveniles weren't writing novels or composing sonnets in their spare time; they were watching Laverne & Shirley. Better to have minds actively composing the soap opera of their own lives than zoning out in front of someone else's." so as further proof of the increased amount of mental labor put into digesting entertainment, johnson points to blogs. even among younger generations, the amount of writing produced daily (he sites a study by yahoo that some 270000 blog entries are published every day) is astronomical. but, because it's in a medium that threatens the old medium (printing) mass public automatically fears it (lots of mcluhan here). so, in an effort to continue to increase the intelligence of american through mental work, cultural digestion, and increased text, here is my blog post.