Is pop culture making us dumb?

From what you've read (read first), is Popular culture (games, tv, film) just a method to "sophisticatedly deliver stupidity" (Steve paraphrasing George Will)?

I can only assume that Steve is paraphrasing this George Will. If that is the case, then I find Will's stance quite interesting as he is a consumer of one of American society's oldest and most profitable forms of popular culture: sports.

Now, before I continue with this line of thought, let me give the disclaimer that I, too, am a huge sports fan. Like Will, I am especially fond of baseball and am actually sharing my desk with a bobblehead figure of the Red Sox announcers on the New England Sports Network right this moment and just counted over 30 sports memorabilia items in my office.

And yet, I can't help but think that if there ever was a field of popular culture that was dumbing us down and generally being a negative influence, it would be athletics. First on the list of negative effects of our love for sports: the fact that athletes make millions of dollars a year and teachers don't even bring in six figures. Second is the fact that athletes behave just as badly as any other type of celebrity and are just as easily influencing fans to behave badly (hello, baseball steroids scandal; professional athletes that get slapped on the wrist for drunk driving; and men who brag about having slept with thousands of women). And of course, the aspect of athletics that may actually be making us dumber as a society: the tradition of passing athletes in their academics that starts in middle school and continues right through college.

Anyway, I'm with Johnson that popular culture may actually be making consumers smarter in some ways and I'll go back to the example of baseball. Baseball is a game that is easy to enjoy even if you know very little about it, but it is actually a very complex game. Understanding baseball to a point that you can comprehend strategy and statistics is actually quite difficult. Baseball can teach a person a lot about numbers just as television can teach him or her about interpersonal relationships in Johnson's example.