“Welcome to the Internet. Where the men are men, the women are men, and the children are the FBI.”—Unknown
“I very much believe the Internet is indeed all it is cracked up to be.”—Jeff Bezos
“Internet does not equal sodium pentothal.”—Drew Barrymore
I don’t know which of the above statements is the closest to my opinion of the Internet. Actually, I really haven’t a single clue what Drew was talking about. What I do know about the Internet is, there’s a lot of stuff going on in there and I’m fascinated by all of it.
That’s why, for the last week of every month, I’ll dig through all the love, rage, viral videos, and GIFs of someone’s pet ferret who goes to the bank (HE THINKS HE’S PEOPLE!) so you don’t have to.
In honour of the bizarrely tweetable Emmy Awards last weekend, let’s talk about how weird it is the frequency with which we tweet about TV.
(Caution: Breaking Bad spoilers ahead, but the episode aired like two weeks ago, so get it together if you’re behind, bro. There are also Game of Thrones spoilers, and that episode aired, like, three months ago and in that case you have no excuse.)
Live-tweeting award shows has been common for at least three or four years now, and I’m sure it will continue when January 2014 comes around.
The tweetable moments in these shows are more often than not blatantly obvious, even when the shows’ producers are coming up with them themselves. When Will Ferrell accepted a Comedic Genius Award at the MTV Movie Awards, Parks and Recreation star Aubrey Plaza crashed his speech by trying to pull Ferrell’s trophy away from him with #ToDoList, the name of her upcoming film, scrawled on her chest.
It’s not like John Travolta crashed Woody Allen’s Oscar speech in 1978 with #SaturdayNightFever written on his forehead, so these sorts of grandiose acts of laugh-baiting are clearly there for the social media class to eat up.
Another example of the live, one-time, television event that’s almost always heavily tweeted all the way through, is a sporting event. Basketball games, football games, and hockey games are given commentary by amateurs on pretty much any social media platform.
Superbowls, especially half-time performances, are particularly popular. This year’s Superbowl is a great example with Beyoncé’s performance and subsequent power outage that lead to the most obnoxious onslaught of people all making the same joke at once I’ve ever seen.
But over the past year or so, it’s not just these live events that are getting social media coverage.
Sunday before last, I made the rookie mistake of going on Twitter while Breaking Bad was live. Thankfully, the only thing I saw was that Walt had abducted his infant daughter, Holly, and the other, more serious plot points were left behind.
When I discussed with one of my friends the possibility of a Breaking Bad series finale party, he said we should do a media blackout to avoid being spoiled before we could stream the episode after it aired.
In a June episode of Game of Thrones, apparently every one of the show’s 27,000 or so characters died within a few minutes. I’ve never seen the Internet go so berserk over a fictional TV scene, especially when you consider how many of the show’s fans knew it was coming, given that the disturbing scene is in the books as well.
It’s interesting that while tweeting live performances, sports, or award shows seems obvious, tweeting a scripted television show still seems weird to me.
But, as much as the fear of spoiling someone’s experience keeps me from tweeting Breaking Bad as I watch it, I think it’s great that any fan of any show can find an entire community of people who are watching the same things they are, looking for opinions, predictions, and other commentary just by typing in a hashtag.
It’s also interesting to think about how many people are going to be drawn to certain TV shows because of their FOMO when they read the tweets coming in while a popular series is airing. I’d never been interested in watching Game of Thrones before the infamous Red Wedding episode, but seeing what everyone was saying about it online piqued my interest in the episode, and ultimately the entire show.
In a short amount of time, Twitter became almost a necessary part of the TV-watching experience. As someone who loves both media, I’m stoked to see if Twitter and TV networks incorporate each other more, changing the television-watching experience as time goes on.
—@eissacaylward
