You Are What You Watch
How Movies and TV Affect Everything
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
Pulitzer Prize-winning author and data expert Walt Hickey explains the power of entertainment to change our biology, our beliefs, how we see ourselves, and how nations gain power.
Virtually anyone who has ever watched a profound movie, a powerful TV show, or read a moving novel understands that entertainment can and does affect us in surprising and significant ways. But did you know that our most popular forms of entertainment can have a direct physical effect on us, a measurable impact on society, geopolitics, the economy, and even the future itself? In You Are What You Watch, Walter Hickey, Pulitzer Prize winner and former chief culture writer at acclaimed data site FiveThirtyEight.com, proves how exactly how what we watch (and read and listen to) has a far greater effect on us and the world at large than we imagine.
Employing a mix of research, deep reporting, and 100 data visualizations, Hickey presents the true power of entertainment and culture. From the decrease in shark populations after Jaws to the increase in women and girls taking up archery following The Hunger Games, You Are What You Watch proves its points not just with research and argument, but hard data. Did you know, for example, that crime statistics prove that violent movies actually lead to less real-world violence? And that the international rise of anime and Manga helped lift the Japanese economy out of the doldrums in the 1980s? Or that British and American intelligence agencies actually got ideas from the James Bond movies?
In You Are What You Watch, readers will be given a nerdy, and sobering, celebration of popular entertainment and its surprising power to change the world.
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In this penetrating debut, Hickey, winner of a Pulitzer Prize for illustrated reporting, deconstructs "how media and culture shapes us as individuals and collectively." Movies, he argues, have physiological effects on viewers that scientists are only beginning to understand, as revealed by a study that measured the chemical composition of the air in screenings of The Hunger Games: Catching Fire and found that levels of isoprene (a chemical humans release when muscles tense) spiked during key scenes. Examining the appeal of common genres and tropes, Hickey suggests that heist films tap into anxieties about "who deserves what, and whether the small and weak deserve what the strong have." He also studies the social effects of movies, noting that the popularity of collies skyrocketed after the release of the 1943 film Lassie Come Home, as did New Zealand tourism after Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movies. The trivia surprises and the bounty of colorful charts and graphs visualizing, for instance, the traits Spider-Man shares with each of his villains and the explosion of "Hallelujah" covers after the 2001 release of Shrek (which featured a version of the Leonard Cohen song on its soundtrack), offer fun insight into popular culture. This is a blast. Photos.
