Reality TV, Social Media and the Big Crunch

By Aaron Whitaker, MZD Sr. Copywriter

The other day while driving to work, I was thinking about the recent buzz around Twitter and the “social media boom” and the popularity of reality TV shows like American Idol and Survivor and how it’s all related and how it’s nothing new in this world. Is this “history repeating itself” or “the big bang theory”? Will this be the “new dot.com bubble burst” or “the big crunch”? Since the dawn of time, man has conversed. We’ve talked with each other in the streets, in the market, at the coliseum before the lions killed the gladiators, in the coffee shops, and the front porches. Humans have always been social animals. We have always crowded into cities to live on top of each other. We, for the most part, have feared isolation and silence.

But over the past century, something happened called “technology”. Technology in the form of automobiles allowed people to move further away from each other. Then radio and TV took the role of neighbors and friends as people stayed home listening and watching fictional shows, their eyes glued to light-emitting tubes of glorious wonderment. Technology, while not exactly a bad thing, has been very bad for the social side of human existence. We have slowly become more isolated from each other and with the dawn of the internet in the 90’s, we became even more isolated. And then the Big Crunch came to an end. The Big Crunch is the idea that space eventually stops expanding and reverses and collapses, ultimately leading to another Big Bang. So if we think of technology as the beginning of the Big Crunch of socialization. Slowly over the pat century we have become even more isolated from each other and talked less to each other until that one fateful day we became so isolated from each other that we all blew up.

The Big Bang happened.

And it happened in the form of Reality TV and social media. Reality TV allowed us to become a part of other people’s lives. We rooted for reality TV stars, we voted for them and these reality TV stars became part of our household and part of our dinner table conversation. They started the ball rolling. But for the most part, TV is a one way conversation which is why social media was created. Around the same time that Survivor started the Reality TV Big Bang (yes, there have been other Reality TV shows before then, but Survivor was the beginning of the now boom in Reality TV); Friendster started the Social Media Big Bang or boom. And then came Myspace, American Idol, Facebook, Top Chef, Twitter, Rock of Love and about a hundred more shows and social media tools.

We are now in the first phases of the Big Bang of socialization. Every day, there are news ways to talk and converse with other people. We have gone beyond the idea of talking with neighbors, friends and family; we are now talking with complete strangers and people around the world. We can tell and share with the world anything and everything. Some of us are at the point where we are sharing too much (seriously, I don’t care if you just went to the grocery store to pick up milk). And one day, maybe soon, maybe hundreds even thousands of years later, we will slowly reverse back and experience a new Big Crunch of socialization. Whether it’s history repeating itself, the cyclical nature of the universe, the big bang/big crunch theory or some other theory or idea, it’s definitely an interesting point in time we are all facing and experiencing right now. Technology has been turned on its side and has now connected the world in one conversation.

Where do we go from here? What will cause the next Big Crunch? Will it be technology, war, disease, natural disasters or will it be Google going down for more than just three hours? (I thought I’d never survive the Google Fail of May 14, 2009.)

Who knows, who disagrees, who cares, who wants to talk about it?