We Americans have had our share of entertaining pretenders. From yesteryear’s The Monkees to Disney’s Lemonade Mouth, there have been plenty of producer-created bands and groups designed to charm us with their pretty faces and captivate us with well-turned tunes (even when, in some cases, they weren’t even singing). But even our best crowd-pleasing Svengalis haven’t come up with anything quite like AKB48.
This oddly named all-girl Japanese group holds the Guinness World Record as the pop group with the most members. At last count there were around 58 pretty teens in the mix, who generally split up into four separate squads and do everything from live stage shows to product-fronting ads to studio albums. All of this makes AKB48 a little … odd. But just wait ’til I tell you about the band’s newest member.
Eguchi Aimi officially joined the group doing a pitch for a little Japanese ice confection, joining six other girls as front-women for the product. But it was Aimi—with her picture-perfect teeth and hair, cute twinkling eyes, angelic persona and sweet singing voice—who entranced the viewers.
Next thing you know, she’s smiling from all the ad posters and gaining fans. But the sunshiny little 16-year-old had a dark secret: She was a fake. And I don’t mean a lip-syncing Milli Vanilli kind of fake. I mean she was 100% not real.
The AKB48 producers had fashioned her digitally, out of bits and computer graphic pieces from the other six girls in the group. A nose from this girl, the twinkling eyes from that one. And somehow, they made the blend look uncannily real.
She was so real, in fact, that the thousands of Eguchi Aimi fans were dumbstruck when the truth became known. And many were quite upset. I saw one YouTube clip where a young teen was in tears over the loss of her idol-who-never-was. Reactions like that can’t help but raise questions about this new kind of reality that today’s advanced tech is beginning to create. Gizmodo.com writer Jesus Diaz put it like this:
And while the Eguchi Aimi phenomenon may be just anecdotical [sic], the fact that a synthetic creation has been able to make their fans have crushes and feelings without them never realizing she was a figment of someone's imagination, a digital mutant mix, is not a simple anecdote. That's very real. When people perceive such a being as real, and that being causes an emotive response in them, then that makes that character part of reality. It has an tangible impact on their worlds. The physical world which, at the end of the day, is just synthesized by our brains from our senses (which are just arbitrary signal input devices).
Diaz goes on to wonder what’ll happen next as the real and the virtual continue to collide. You can’t blame him. Obviously this is only the beginning of what we’ll soon see. And in our society that’s so obsessed with photoshop-perfect images and superstar crushes, well-made pretenders could change the face of quite a bit.
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