LOST Characters Versus Philosophers: Who Wins at Google?

As any LOST fan is aware (hey, remember LOST?), the show is replete with philosophical references. But even though the philosophical references often have nothing to do with anything when you think about it, has the phenomenon that is LOST eclipsed the original philosophers in question? Self-described “wack-ademic and a designerd” Raynor Ganan conducted an informal little test: He did Google Image searches for “John Locke” and “Jeremy Bentham,” both names assigned to Terry O’Quinn‘s bald-headed fella at various points in the series, and graphed the number of faces he saw for each result out of the first 100 faces displayed.

As you can see from the above charts, LOST‘s John Locke beat out real John Locke, 57% to 34%; real Jeremy Bentham beat LOST Jeremy Bentham 69% to 27%. I’m a little surprised even by that, though. The “Jeremy Bentham” bit on LOST was, IMO, a kind of unnecessary plot twist-setup that occurred in the middle of the series and was subsequently dropped, and wasn’t really the identifier with which we primarily associated O’Quinn’s character; still, that was good enough for 27 Google results.

When else has pop culture hijacked high culture?

(The Ragbag via Urlesque Tumblr)