My friend and I have this game we like to play. He calls me up, and then quotes a random thing happening on TMZ or a reality show.
I usually don’t get the reference. I then throw one to him, he doesn’t get it either, but we keep going.
This is how we communicate, and let me tell you, we manage to tell each other nothing while talking to each other.
He, like a lot of college students these days, consumes pop culture trivia to the point where he can’t tell you who Nancy Pelosi is. But he can definitely tell you John Mayer is too candid without ever actually seeing the interview where he was.
This isn’t such a bad thing in itself, except when you zone out other sources of news and let it influence the real world.
For example, according to an article by the National Post, medical students and residents are failing to perform simple medical procedures because they’re doing them the same way they do on medical dramas like “Grey’s Anatomy.”
They see how they do it on TV and then decide that’s the way it’s done. Just like what some experts have dubbed the “CSI Effect.”
This is where jurors now expect that unless there is 100 percent undisputed DNA evidence proving guilt, the defendant is innocent, according to Simon Cole and Rachel Dioso-Villa with the University of California, Irvine with the Department of Criminology.
The problem is that, unlike CSI, no forensics expert can pick up a random piece of hair on the crime scene and then an hour later, identify the culprit. Real police work takes more time and is more uncertain.
This can get even more confusing down the line. History, to an extent, is pop culture that was never corrected.
For instance, the popular belief that lemmings leap to their deaths off of cliffs for some unknown reason is a myth that Disney solidified with the 1958 documentary “White Wilderness.”
The makers of the film pushed the animals off of a cliff with a rotating platform, committing animal cruelty to cement the legend.
It can be fun to read up on celebrity gossip and watch a TV show with impossible odds, as long as you can keep the real world from fiction.
