Well, the users have been spending lots of time on social networks and the other new types of digital water coolers online, but it doesn’t mean that they won’t come back to the traditional mass media. In fact, experts feel social media can actually contribute to the success of mainstream media by helping us decide what to watch. Matt Frassica on Courier Journal talks about the world around digital water coolers and suggests that may be social media is allowing blockbusters on mass media. When there’s a lot of choice out there, people ask for recommendations – don’t they ?
Indeed, 2010 has seen a handful of shared cultural moments witnessed by audiences bigger than they’ve been in years past. In March, the Academy Awards reached its largest audience in five years. The Super Bowl between the Indianapolis Colts and New Orleans Saints surpassed the finale of “M*A*S*H” for the largest TV audience in history. The film “Avatar” — at nearly $2.7 billion at the box office — continues to shatter records. Even the State of the Union address and the Conan-Leno drama drew huge ratings and inspired lively debate.
So what’s going on? One possible explanation: social networks, long expected to kill TV, are instead functioning as digital water coolers, where we viewers actively discuss and debate mainstream cultural programming. And because there are so few of those shared cultural events left, it’s all the more critical that we watch so we’ll have something for Facebook updates and to Twitter about. It also doesn’t hurt that Twittering and watching TV are cheap entertainment during a recession.
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- The Sanity Checklist For Digital Marketers (a.k.a The Art of Slow Digital Marketing)
- Fending off the digital decay of ‘born-digital’ material – bit by bit
