Though academia is most certainly no 'Ivory Tower,' nor does it necessarily house greater numbers of 'smart' people than other sectors and professions, I am comfortable suggesting that those who go into research and academia tend to be more interested in the pursuit of knowledge than the average person. If you weren't interested in the pursuit (and teaching and sharing and preserving) of knowledge, I wouldn't think you'd be very happy in academia, and certainly not better paid than you could be if you left it for *greener* pastures.
Being interested in the pursuit of knowledge is by no means incompatible with being interested in the puerile and pop-cultural; but it's also very important, I believe, to be able to assess and filter the quality of information and cultural productions one is exposed to on a daily basis. Those of us who study literature have an advantage here, as we regularly have to make or address rigorous (and some not so rigorous) arguments that have been in play for centuries about what's worth reading, studying, teaching, and talking about. We can apply this knowledge to what we're exposed to in our lives outside of professional scholarship with relative ease; and even some of us, in the dreaded 'cultural studies' pop-culture wing, even do professionally assess pop-cultural productions from advertisements to Xena, Warrior Princess.
On the other hand, the work of a natural scientist is not so translatable in this respect. Though the scientific method can be fruitfully applied in spirit to virtually anything (in fact, basic literary criticism follows the same steps, only without the possibility of falsification), its professional application in the natural sciences requires that a standard of objective proof be met. This standard is simply not available for evaluating and filtering information and cultural productions.
I'm tempted to go on anecdotally about the many natural scientists I know, and the extent to which lots of them don't seem to bother filtering information in any serious way once they leave the lab. I'm tempted to draw unsupported and prejudicial conclusions about the fact that some of my smartest friends can carry a conversation about multiverse theory or Kim Kardashian, but are pretty much lost if the conversation veers toward anything in between.
The fact is, however, that it's not just an unrepresentative sample of natural scientists who build a wall between serious intellectual life and everything else. Many of us do it, particularly, it seems, if we actually have a rich intellectual life, which takes up significant energy and time. At the end of the day many of us do need to turn off and watch trash TV. But it is worth considering the implications of the mentality that if it can't be measured or definitively quantified then it's not worth thinking about or processing rigorously. If you can't see the difference between Hard Times and Hunger Games, let alone the difference between Harry Potter and Real Housewives of Orange County, we're all in trouble.
Yes, there's value in being able to judge the relevance and importance of this book or that, this movie or that TV show. Everything outside of your intellectual or work life isn't the same; and just because it's creative or cultural or artistic doesn't mean its implications are confined to the realm of entertainment, or the unserious world. If you're old enough to remember when you could go to a baseball game and witness an exhilarating play at the plate without an announcer coming on and saying 'Safe at home. Safe and secure. New York Life,' you intuitively understand what I'm saying here. If a commercial market for cheap, inane, bitter, nasty, vindictive, and superficial reality programming, pumped full of product placement, consumer cues, and horrible people comes to define the ideas and representations we consume, think about, and discuss in our daily lives when we're not at work, we're screwed.
The only way to get unscrewed is to be more selective about what we put in our brains, and to understand that even if this is not a process that leads to falsification, we can be rigorously selective about such things. There is a way to discriminate between cultural productions without hard measurement, and to do so reliably and rigorously. That doesn't mean entirely forsaking guilty pleasures and cheap entertainment. Your doctor may want you to cut down on cholesterol for the sake of your health, but she's not asking you to become a vegan.
