Mainstream television has become more intellectually demanding over recent decades

Evidence

Following very popular series like Seinfeld, ER or The West Wing demands much more complex mental operations than was the case in the 1960s. … For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption that mass culture follows a steadily declining path toward lowest-common-denominator standards, presumably because the “masses” want dumb, simple pleasures and big media companies want to give the masses what they want. But in fact, the exact opposite is happening: the culture is getting more intellectually demanding, not less. — Yves Citton, The Ecology of Attention, 451

Categorization

• XREF: Challenges the standard Frankfurt-school Adorno line on mass culture as stupefying, drawing instead on Steven Johnson’s ‘Everything Bad Is Good for You’. — connects to: Broadcast television shifts track thirty years of British cultural decline — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1678
• SEED: Article angle: ‘cognitive workout not life lessons’ as an updated metric for evaluating mass media’s cognitive demands rather than its explicit content.