J. Craig Venters’s seriously overreached when he claimed last week that his lab was the first to create synthetic life. Television has been creating synthetic life on a massive scale for decades and video games have been doing it for years.
What could possibly be more synthetic than family life in “The Honeymooners,” “I Love Lucy,” “Father Knows Best,” “Ozzie and Harriet,” or “Leave It To Beaver,” or “The Waltons?” That’s easy – the longest running sitcom in television history is also the most synthetic (it does even use live actors, it’s animated) and the most injurious to the image of fatherhood – “The Simpsons.”
Because television has always been in the advertising-delivery business and interested only peripherally in its effect on culture and society, it pitches the appeal of the majority of its entertainment content to the largest segment of mass consumers, lower- and middle-income women 18-49.
Is it no wonder that the heroes of this entertainment eye candy are savvy, long-suffering, loving, and sometimes funny women who show up their clueless, often childish, self-centered husbands? And as the years go by, it seems like the men get dumber and more helpless until we finally get to the ultimate stupid loser, Homer Simpson.
Network television entertainment programming doesn’t attempt to mirror or even define real life; it tries to embody in a video format the dreams of its primary target audience in order to sell this audience soap. Dreams are not reality, they are a synthetic, fuzzy, exaggerated replays of real-life problems in which our minds attempt a subconscious workout of our daily challenges.
And are television reality programs not synthetic? “Survivor,” “Bridezilla,” and their clones are as synthetic as the sitcoms mentioned above. The ultimate of being synthetic, or, more appropriately, of lying (the two words are have essentially the same meaning at their core) is television claiming that their programs are “reality” programs – it is the same newspeak (words the opposite of truth, as in Orwell’s 1984) as Fox News constantly claiming it is “fair and balanced.”
So J. Craig Venters and his brilliant colleagues in his lab might have created synthetic life, which brings up a few ethical issues, but it isn’t even close to being as synthetic or unethical as most television entertainment programming.
Bruce Braun writes:
“Ask any TV programming exec if they think TV programming has a deleterious effect upon societal behavior, especially kids and they go red-faced denying any impact.
Ask any media sales person, ad agency or brand manager if repeated exposure to TV ads influences purchasing behavior and you will get a resounding YES!
Talk about being passive-aggressive!
Either TV influences behavior or it does not.
The absolute proof is the effectiveness of advertising.
To portray parents the way Ozzie Nelson did was at least aspirational, to a degree. Most of us of that generation, sometimes wished our parents could be like Ozzie & Harriett.
The Homer Simpson, Real Housewives of.., models do nothing more than to tacitly encourage kids to see the emptiness of those examples in their own parents and in others, rather than an Ozzie Nelson or Bill Cosby type models.
In short, TV programming today is all about being alienated, disrespectful and disdainful masked within those slick and synthetic production values.
All one has to do to confirm the societal impact of that sort of TV programming is to watch the news on TV or pick up a newspaper.”