One of my friends recently brought up something that's relevant to our class. She was saying that her favorite thing about social media is that you can "'watch' things without actually having to sit and watch things." She was referring to the Oscars but I think it can definitely refer to lot of other media.
For those with tumblrs, I'm sure we've had the experience of understanding the plotlines of countless shows without even watching a second of it. We see posts (gifs, graphics, text posts, pretty much anything) and unless you block out posts in that show, it’s likely that you will get spoiled about the plotlines and characters of the story. Usually this happens with a bigger fandom (Supernatural, Doctor Who, Teen Wolf, etc.) If you’re on tumblr for an extended amount of time, you probably will get exposed to a popular show, whether you want to or not.
Going back to the Oscars, twitter was blowing up with updates throughout the night about who won what (sidenote: I’m team Lupita Nyong’o forever), along with updates about the speeches, jokes, skits, attire, and more. At one point during the night, Ellen Degeneres (who hosted) challenged viewers to break the record of retweets (which was the first thing Obama tweeted after this past presidential election) and instead make a selfie with her and a slew of different actors the most retweeted. This CRASHED twitter. And broke the record before the night was over.
There’s no doubt that this passing of information so quickly would have been possible without the internet. I believe we’ve spoken about this topic before in class but I wanted to give an example of this phenomenon in action.
