Scholars in a Snooki World

By Christine Vi

Alcott High School for the Humanities

Video by Christine Vi

Elizabeth Best, 15, is a flesh-and-bones version of a Lisa Simpson, the smart, socially conscious character in the Fox cartoon “The Simpsons.” Best is a straight A student and a member of her school’s debate team. To top it all off, she is ranked No. 1 at Alcott High School for the Humanities in Chicago.

But ask schoolmates to vote for Elizabeth or Snooki in a popularity contest, the behaviorally challenged party girl, whose real name is Nicole Polizzi, would probably win.

Centuries ago, it was the beauty versus brawn idea that was epitomized by the ancient Greeks. Brains was relegated to a lesser role then, but not anymore. While beauty remains a potent adversary, having brains has moved up in this technologically savvy world.

One reason that beauty remains formidable is the media’s glamorization of it in advertising and casting. “Jersey Shore” features a clique of cohabitating “pretty” people who have gone from making $2,200 an episode in the first season to at least $30,000 for each taping in the second.

“I think you have some very, very solid norms for how people are supposed to look, and I think people play a role when they try to fulfill those norms,” said Kevin Hirn, a debater at Whitney Young Magnet High School who rejects being called a geek because of its ‘negative’ connotation.

“So you try to perform how you experience the world—you act a certain way, you dress a certain way, you talk a certain way to try to get responses from people in a certain way,” he adds, commenting on the teens who may emulate behaviors or roles portrayed in the media.

Youth are highly influenced by media-driven forces that may seem to neglect those who are smart for those with fabulous features. Even though there are “smart” shows such as “Nova” and “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader,” there are far more shows like “Gossip Girl,” “Hellcats” and “Vampire Diaries” on regular network TV. Teen-targeted shows focusing on the school nerd or the girl genius are hard to find.

On cable, “Jersey Shore” was able to draw 8.4 million viewers on the week ending Jan. 9, 2011, according the Nielsen ratings.

A 2005 TIME magazine poll of 1,010 respondents found that 34 percent spent four to 10 hours a week watching TV, 26 percent spent 11 to 20 hours and 14 percent spent 30 or more hours. A University of Iowa Children’s Hospital study http://www.uihealthcare.com/topics/medicaldepartments/pediatrics/tvchildren/index.html found that youth spent 15,000 hours a year watching television compared with 11,000 hours in school.

Teens watching TV are bombarded with advertisements showing mostly glamorous and attractive pitchmen and women. Most programs feature cutesy teens who get by in life on the basis of their looks, not their brains. This can warp a teen’s sense that intelligence does matter, considering the big payoff for the “Jersey Shore” cast.

But let's take at look at Kim Kardashian and Marissa Mayer, for example. Kardashian's name will ring a bell. But Mayer, who is she?

Both are very attractive women in their 30s but what separates them is how they put their intellect to use. Kardashian gets all the press due to her voluptuous derriere, star-studded boyfriends and business enterprises. Mayer gets much less attention for her accomplishments as the first female engineer at Google, a highly touted vice president who supervises an army of product managers and software engineers at the Internet and technology behemoth.

"Marissa is surprisingly pretty in person,” said Valleywag blogger and editor Owen Thomas in a recent San Francisco magazine article. (Valleyway is a Gawker media blog about Silicon Valley celebrities.) “That in itself is a rarity in Silicon Valley, and you’d have to be naïve to think that doesn’t color people’s views of her.”

A 2009 article in the Journal of Applied Psychology indicates having both beauty and brains aren't bad qualities to possess.

“We've found that, even accounting for intelligence, a person's feeling of self-worth is enhanced by how attractive they are and this, in turn, results in higher pay,” said Timothy Judge of the University of Florida about a study http://news.ufl.edu/2009/05/11/brainsvsbeauty/ that explored the link between good looks and good salaries.

It found that attractiveness, combined with confidence, may help a job-seeker stand out among the pack. In the study of about 200 men and women ages 25 to 75, good-looking people tended to view themselves and their worth more highly, which led to more money and less financial stress.

Judge contended in the article that the potential income pay off of education and intelligence was still greater than good looks alone.

Oh, about Kardashian. Her family had that E! reality show on cable TV and she appeared on “Dancing With the Stars.” The Los Angeles socialite broke up with NFL star Reggie Bush and was spotted kissing soccer star Cristiano Ronaldo. Now she is marketing fashion and makeup.

Her lifestyle plays right into the media storyline: shining the spotlight on people known as party girls and leaving the school valedictorians in the dark.

“There are not a lot of party girls founding Microsofts,” noted Kirn.

“I like being a nerd,” said Sydney Doe, 16, also a member of Whitney Young’s debate team. “I feel like I am similar to other nerds, so I have a good group of friends there.”

“I feel like I wouldn’t really get to be myself around party girls,” she added. “I feel I just don’t care as much about being noticed as the party girls would.”

This reporter conducted a survey of 50 students from three Chicago high schools: Whitney Young, Lane Tech and Alcott. Of the 50 respondents, ages 14 to 18, the findings revealed:

* 14 of the teens would watch the PBS science series “Nova” over the CW's teen drama “Gossip Girl.”

* 36 were unfamiliar with “Nova.”

* 43 chose the MTV reality show “Jersey Shore” about the exploits of eight co-ed housemates as their favorite television program.

“Nova” is not alone in getting shortchanged. On Dec. 29, “Gossip Girl” had recorded nearly 7.6 million “likes” on Facebook compared to the Discovery Channel 's almost 1.6 million. The goes along with the more than 2 million TV viewers drawn each week to the drama about privileged young adults on Manhattan's Upper East Side.

“I feel like it is significantly more entertaining to watch, you know, pretty people,” Doe said. “I feel like sex sells and our society definitely has an obsession with it—with sexuality.

“So pretty people and sexy stories are more interesting to people,” the teen debater noted. “So they, the media, focus on that because it sells.”

The fact that Snooki and her cohorts on “Jersey Shore” trump “Nova” in the informal survey by a 3:1 ratio may not be too startling, considering that youth in the U.S. spend more time watching TV than doing homework.

So more are familiar with the gossip of celebrities than the answers to a geography quiz. This heavy exposure to television can distort reality for teens in their formative years. They may ask themselves about Snooki’s housemate Jenni Farley: “If J-Woww gets drunk every night on ‘Jersey Shore’ and still is fine by the next episode, why can’t I?”

Reality television gets confused with the realities of real life.

But all is not lost. In a survey of 25 of about 175 students at Alcott High School, 18 said the cheerleaders were not as popular as the highly successful debate team, which beat 42 opponents in a November matchup. Whitney Young’s team in the Academic Decathlon has won 24 of 25 annual state competitions, including first in 2010, and placed third in the national tournament last year. Also the 2000 movie “Cheaters” is loosely based on the academic squad’s exploits.

The two schools’ athletic teams or cheerleaders can’t make similar boasts about their achievements. So brains can trump beauty and brawn.

So, Snooki, consider yourself snookered.