Gerald Graff's Essay 'Hidden Intellectualism'

Alexandra Pasia
Professor Look
English 101
19 February 2015
Annotated Bibliography
Technology has advanced over the past decades, rapidly influencing today’s social culture. Social media is still developing into many different forms. Those forms can include Smartphone’s, computers, laptops, television, and tablets. Whichever the object is, it has also become a form of communication in many different ways. So much of people’s lives are impacted by social media, and there are many debates that whether or not it has a positive or negative effects on society.
Graff, Gerald. “Hidden Intellectualism.” “They Say/I Say” The Moves That Matter in Academic Writing with Readings. Gerald Graff, Cathy Birkenstein, and Russel Durst. New York: Norton, 2012.
Graff insists that education in school and college does not only advance intellectualism. He says that being “street smart” involves knowing many things in life learned from life experiences and interests outside of school, therefore helps gain intelligence and intellect; but schools and colleges disagree. Graff describes his childhood experiences where the town he grew up in and his interests in sports at the time. Graff continues on with his love of sports and how it helped him become more intellectual within himself and with his peers. Graff realizes that his debates about sports with his friends helped him learn certain skills such as making and argument, collecting and comparing evidence, look at different views and analyzing. He says that street smarts encourage the desire for debate and discussion with a community, thus, believes that schools and colleges should include nonacademic interests such as TV, cars, sports, media, fashion, music, in curriculum. Graff’s essay on intellectualism proves an idea that everyone is intellectual, they just need the proper opportunity to expose
When watching a program, people are focused on the plot, make inferences, and create relationships with characters. Therefore, develops a cognitive exercise for the audience. Johnson informs his readers that there is an interaction between people and a television screen. Some examples he describes are when TV shows allow the viewer to develop a mental outline of a show, when a characters encounter social issues, and giving someone a cultural experience through a TV screen. He includes visuals that show different threads of TV programs, displaying the complexity of their scenes overtime, and how much it challenges the brain. Those graphs associate with Johnson’s term the “Sleeper Curve” (279), which according to him is the most debased form of mass diversion. He says that even if it is just reality television, violent content on TV or video games, and children shows, it still helps people become perceptive. Johnson concludes that instead of people having a negative attitude or having fears of their children being influenced by content of TV or video games, he insists that they both should share the experience. Parents and children will continue to interact with the TV screen mentally and therefore develop skills no matter what they watch. This essay presents in argument that television is good for