I bought a bourgeois house in the Hollywood hills
With a truckload of hundred thousand dollar bills
Man came by to hook up my cable TV
We settled in for the night my baby and me
We switched ’round and ’round ’til half-past dawn
There was fifty-seven channels and nothin’ on
Bruce Springsteen, 1992
How quaint, 57 channels of viewing options. Back in the early 1990s, really only a decade removed from the swan song of the Big Three television networks, 57 channels was a hard thing for most Americans to get their heads around. Who could have envisioned a world with thousands of channels, and infinitely more web sites, and still nothing on?
Consuming digital media, with the exception of gaming, is largely a solitary pursuit. Even watching television alone is a more social activity, particularly in the days before our current age of abundance. The next day at work, school, play, people would share what they had all watched the previous night from the comfort of their own home. The common experience of the hit television show, however superficially, bound us together.
Now I obviously know that the Web is largely about sharing – links, stories, videos, etc. yet I often feel as if I am somehow missing out. Like, where is everybody, what are they experiencing, what am I missing out on? (And I am not talking about Facebook or Twitter, which to me is more about sharing ones offline routine online.) Even when visiting a popular site, there is no sense of the audience that is sharing that same property with you at that very instance.
I know that this is all a bit vague, but to me there seems to be an opportunity for someone to come along and add some context to the online media experience, much like Amazon has done for online shopping. When perusing the aisles at Amazon, with the site’s abundance of rankings (popularity) and reviews, you get a sense that you are in a crowded, energetic bazaar. Amazon’s recent integration of Facebook Connect with its recommendation engine – see story here http://tcrn.ch/aHUsM7 – is the company’s next step in ensuring that you are never alone when shopping.
Can that sense of energy and community be created around online content consumption? Are there tools to help get people out of the rut of “watching” the same handful of sites each day? God knows that we humans hugely influence one another. (For more on this point, check out this great deck from Paul Adams at Google entitled The Real Life Social Network – http://bit.ly/b6A03x)
Two companies that appear to be tackling this challenge and are worth keeping an eye on are Clicker – http://www.clicker.com – and Buzzfeed – http://www.buzzfeed.com. Both aggregate media, one as a kind of TV guide for 2010, the other ostensibly as an editor of what is hot online at the moment (Yahoo Buzz also does this well). Importantly both give you a glimpse into what the larger, invisible Internet audience is up to, where they are spending their time, hence what they value. Throw in Facebook Connect and their “like” initiative and we begin to see the seeds of an audience awareness movement that should both reinforce those things we already knew as well as expose individuals to sites and experiences they were unaware of.
