Life Expectancy Test
Channel 7 devoted a couple of hours to this complete waste of time tonight. Surely, I am not the only one who thought that this was the biggest bad idea since Australian Survivor. I am sure it got the viewership it targeted.
The whole concept of the night was, you purchased a local Sunday paper that had a answer sheet in it, then spend Sunday night watching morning TV hosts ask you the multiple choice questions.
I did not watch the show as a whole, I switched over to it during ads of other stations.
They started with basic questions questions like sex, weight, heartrate. Which make sense if your looking at someone's health and longevity. Then onto questions about diet and lifestyle. Still reasonably relevant to life.
Then came the corkers.
'Do you ride or are a passenger on a motorcycle?' What!
'Do you talk on a hand-held mobile phone while driving?' Huh?
I immediately switched over and never went back after that. Ok, riding a motorcycle can be dangerous, mostly because of other drivers, but being a statistic used in your life expectancy? If anything it's going to knock a lot more than a couple of 'points' from your age.
Same with mobile phones. Talking while driving is stupid. And lots of us do it. When it's looked at properly, if you are talking, or worse, texting while driving, chances are you'll kill someone else rather than yourself. So the marks should be taken off those random people on the street.
I think that this type of thing is just asking for trouble. How many people are unstable enough to take this sort of thing seriously and go off the rails? I certainly think it's a good way to get therapists on side, they are likely to be very busy this week.
Mortality is something we all have to deal with and ultimately face, but it's up to each individual to come to it in their own way, not have it thrown in their face by a statistic based, non individual, guessing game, ratings machine.
Only when we take the road of Gattaca will life expectancy predictions be worth paying attention to. Even then, taken with a grain of salt.
Who knows what tomorrow will bring.
posted by Casyn the librarian
7/12/2004 12:46:00 am
2 viewers interjected with:
Actually, my beef with the show was completely different. You get the same tests across the internet and via email. I got one during a Study of Religion lesson once. Putting something like that on TV seems like a waste of time to me.
I'm assuming they're running on the National I.Q. theme. Which was reasonable - everyone likes to show off how smart they are, you could do it as a family, and you could see how you compare to others. It was also fun.
But what's the point of finding out your life expectancy? If you wanted to, you would seek it out yourself. There is no entertainment value. It's ridiculous to brag to people how long you're expected to live (Assuming you don't get involved in a mobile phone-induced car accident before you get a chance)
12/7/04 1:18 am
Death Race 2000's determining of life expectancy would certainly be more accurate. Especially if you're a pedestrian.
Internet and email tests are just as bad, but not shown nationally on free-to-air. I've never seen the online version and am unlikely to go looking. The only entertainment value would be to an extreme sports fanatic and who looks at it as the biggest challenge of all!
Although, I am sure one of their questions would have been:
'Do you throw yourself of a mountain more than once a month?'
a) Yes - 0 points
b) No - 8 points
c) Don't know - 3 points
12/7/04 1:37 am
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