College football and the digital divide
As a Big XII girl living in a PAC 10 world, the approach of college football season has been a mild cause of consternation. San Francisco isn't exactly a big Longhorn sports town (or sports town period), so following the exploits of Colt and co. with like-minded fans poses a bit of a challenge. But where there's a challenge, the web usually has a solution. Enter FanFeedr, which purports itself to be a real-time personalized sports feed, allowing users to comment and trash-talk live on Facebook and Twitter. A virtual sports experience in essence, which, in the absence of other options, seems okay, right?
CNN hosted a digital viewing party of the presidential debates on Facebook. And more recently, the Michael Jackson funeral aired online side-by-side with messages from fans all over the world via Facebook connect. Xbox is socializing tv and video games, allowing users to brag and post scores directly to Facebook and Twitter from their consoles. And let's not forget the short-lived Twitter/NCAA basketball mash-up, MarchTweetness.com. They're all smart, useful ways to help geographically inconvenient people share experiences. TownHoller, a community-organized event for FourSquare players, does the opposite, bringing the digital world into the physical. It also shows how creating something smart, useful and fun can inspire an active digital user base to celebrate it in person.
It's infinitely easier to sit at home and talk smack digitally than go to a bar and hope you're not the only one chanting "Texas fight!" after a touchdown. But with social networks now bridging the physical and digital worlds in real-time, what will future generations who didn't know the world before Facebook be like? Will the migration away from face-to-face toward screen-to-screen breed well-adjusted adults? We call them social networks, but I wonder if social is really the right word, or if the meaning is just changing.
The illustration below does a nice job of ranking today's communication methods by intimacy. And while 1-9 certainly have valuable places in my life, when it comes to watching college football, number 10 is the only way to go.
