One of my friends likes to tease me about the fact that I don’t watch very much television and I rarely go to the movies. The line that gets used is “culturally deprived.” It is a kind of a take off on the Musical “West Side Story” where Action and the Jets sing about why they are in trouble all of the time.

I’m not really deprived of anything. I just make choices about how to spend my time and I find other entertainments more engaging than watching television. My friends are always asking me if I have seen the latest movies and the answer is almost always, “no.” I could go to movies. I do appreciate that they represent an art form that interprets our culture. I just enjoy curling strips of wood with a plane in my garage and am prone to staying at home.

I think it is important to recognize, however, how much popular media, especially television and movies, affect our culture. The truth is that if I wanted to really figure out why people do the things that they do, it would be important to become a student of all of the influences on society. Among those influences are visual media.

A lot of people who married back when we did ended up naming their daughters Jennifer after the heroine in the movie “Love Story,” so we shouldn’t be surprised that Isabella and Jacob, names from the Twilight series are popular. Ann and Elsa and even Olaf have become more popular as baby names since the movie “Frozen” was released. Actually, I think that those names are great. After all, the movies didn’t invent the names, they are names with long and honorable traditions that stretch back way before there were television and movies.

But Galina, Nicky and Piper are all showing up as popular names for babies, presumably because they are characters in “Orange is the New Black.” It turns out that those names also have ancient roots. Niki can be traced to its Latin roots, Galina does have come from ancient Greek, and Piper is an English name with a long history.

“Khaleesi,” however, doesn’t seem to have any long history. As near as I can find out the word is a title (for “queen”) made up by author George R.R. Martin. “Katniss” and “Finnick” seem also to be made up names. I’m wondering how it is going to be for those youngsters to explain their names to their grandchildren. “Well, it comes from ‘The Hunger Games.’” By then the Hunger Games might seem as old as Conan the Barbarian does today.

Actually, I don’t think movies and television are to blame for the strange names people choose for their children. After all, according to the statistics released by babycenter.com, 48 families named their baby girls “Female” last year. A dozen families chose the spelling “Mavric” for their boys and eleven gave their babies the name “Arson.” I’m thinking there might have been some other options that would make for less trouble for those kids as they grow up.

Our children have Biblical names, which might say something about what I do with my time instead of watching movies.

Names aside, there is something far more important that I have missed by not watching television, however. I haven’t been getting my medical advice from Dr. Oz. Actually, I barely know who he is. But I have read that he is extremely popular. He is a “real” doctor who wears scrubs and appears on television making the complex and highly individualized practice of medicine simple and generic. Weight loss? No problem! Take some coffee bean pills. Dr. Oz picks his diseases in terms of their market appeal. He told the New Yorker, “Cancer is our Angelina Jolie. We could sell that show every day.” This guy brings 2.9 million viewers every day.

The problem is that he might not be the best place to turn for your medical care. According to a study led by Christiana Korownyk of the University of Alberta published in the British Medical Journal, medical research either doesn’t substantiate or flat out contradicts more than half of the medical recommendations made on the Dr. Oz show.

Now my family doctor is human and makes mistakes. But she isn’t dispensing faulty advice half of the time. And she doesn’t give her medical advice to 2.9 million people each day.

And none of us are immune to the effects of mass media. Even though I don’t watch Dr. Oz on television, I have adopted the practice of sneezing into my elbow, even though there is no evidence that it has any effect on decreasing the spread of germs and viruses.

There is a difference between entertainment and solid medical advice. Sadly, some of the folks in our society aren’t paying much attention to that difference. And a significant amount of bad advice is getting circulated. I don’t know if people could watch the show, even knowing that about one third of what is said has its basis in solid medical practice, without being influenced by the other two-thirds of what is said.

But then, I’m shaped by literature and one couldn’t claim that a significant percentage of literature is based in solid research.

Actually, I’ve gotten to the place where I am sort of proud of the fact that i don’t watch much television. I’m pretty sure that my friends can catch a note of condescension and even smugness in my voice when I say, “I never watch that.” After all, none of us has the option of living outside of our culture and our culture is shaped by all kinds of influences, including media.

But I have been known to ask the receptionist to turn off the television set in the doctor’s office waiting room. I wonder what they do when Dr. Oz comes on. It might be a bit like a television in an airport lounge playing an episode from the History Channel’s series of famous plane crashes.

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