Social media, curation and watching tv these days

Lately I've been forming an opinion about the importance of categorization, comparables and curation on the web. I know everyone is keen on social media, and companies are scrambling to keep up, but perhaps we should think more about the contexts in which having reviews, comments, and other forms of interaction make sense. I am certainly not against social media, as it provides a very interesting counterpart to published information, and I have to confess that I am just the kind of nerd that loves to read amazon product reviews. But at other times, say when I am looking for a nature documentary on Hulu, I find the information, well... less than helpful. (Do I really need to see anti evolutionist comments when I'm looking for a nature documentary?) Let's think about this more.




The Hulu problem is that entertainment products such as TV don't appeal to all groups. I can easily love things that other people like and vice versa. At present, the type of user reviews we see online aren't distinguished by different marketing segments, and there are of course many people who think that others should think like them. Hulu is also a case where I'm often very aware of my own preferences, so in that case, I don't care for a long description. I'd prefer something like stars, expert reviews or really, nothing at all. People should save those opinions for dedicated fan / anti-fan sites.
Social scientist spoiler: It might also be interesting to get some observed behavior, rather than opinions, such as "total completed views" divided by "total views started" or something of this nature. Or if reviews were tagged with this information, I would be better able to see who has full information, and who is just writing a snap judgment based on 5 minutes of watching a complicated drama.

This problem of whose views count seems to be showing up now with the implementation of google news, as the company struggles to figure out which blogs are news, which are opinion, which are garbage, etc. Obviously, this is a problem of curation. When I read the New York Times, I know that the company is exercising judgment and restraint over its writers, and if something slips by, they will print a retraction or update. But what about if a prominent writer publishes a blog? What about scientists? (A favorite example is the Becker-Posner blog, which is very entertaining.) Actually, this example makes me think that perhaps academics realize this distinction much better than anyone else, because we know that what is published as peer-reviewed research in journals or as books with university presses will be held up to the highest standard. When we do a blog, it has many advantages: it can reach more people, we can speak in a conversational fashion, it will be updated quickly, and so forth. But this work is categorically different than the highest standards set by peer reviewed research journals. (I am not decided about open access journals, but certainly to grad students who wonder whether they should spend more time on their articles or blogs, the answer is clear. Having a lot of followers on your research blog won't get you tenure, and because it is not vetted by experts in your field, I am not sure that it should ever serve that function, even if you may eventually get points for public engagement.)

Another clear and big problem with curation involves my frequent hobby: watching TV. (Sadly, as an academic, reading feels too much like work, and so aside from the newspaper, I am not reading much outside of work, unless I have been on vacation for a while.) With factors like the digital switchover making it difficult to receive more than a few local channels at once without endless fussing and refinding channels, as well as the growing number of sites to watch shows online, we are moving away from the power of the major networks to provide a curated package of shows. This is no problem when you already know what you like -- just buy the show in physical or virtual form and watch it sequentially. This works great for me, especially with intricate shows that have a lot of character development, which I used to not watch until the dvds were out, due to my busy and erratic schedule. (Perhaps this correlates with why I liked one off episodes of shows like CSI so much?) 

On the other hand, now that I've watched most of the episodes of shows that I liked, and have followed series, and got rid of my tv in moving and digital hassles, I am finding it increasingly difficult to figure out which new shows to bother watching. My extreme frustration with networks for cancelling two shows I really liked--life on mars and defying gravity--is part of this problem, pushing me to go after older network shows and new cable shows, which have less chance of being cancelled just after I've started watching regularly. The question is how to find those things that I'd like to follow? There are also times when having someone else curate would be better, because I just can't be bothered to do a big long web search. The advantage of cable tv is that you can just turn the thing on and start watching a lineup of shows picked by the network that follow both a sequential and temporal order. This is one of the reasons why I like listening to dj sets and shows as a way of finding new music; although TV is somewhat different from music, there is still skill involved in that selection process, putting together a package of things that go together. 

Spending a lot of time finding new things is more of a problem for busy me, as opposed to being something fun for people who have a lot of time on their hands to find and discover things that you like, like teenagers and college students. The search process here is also likely to be related to their process of identity discovery, finding things that are popular or rare, current or historic. 

So in my view, the curation and collection are the true missing elements to both Hulu and Amazon, because although they do have certain types of collections, the collections are static as opposed to dynamic. The TV programming TV of old was dynamic, in that you had a relevant collection of shows at a certain time, which could seem out of date at a later time. Think of Christmas episodes of sitcoms. This temporal movement was also helpful to weed out things that I would watch, but didn't LOVE -- ok, I'll watch dancing with the stars because it's there, but I'm not going to go online to watch old episodes because it's not my thing. I wonder how much this "good enough" vs. blockbuster effect is to blame for changing viewing patterns with buying episodes ala carte? (A perfectly fine show, but I certainly wouldn't be inclined to pay for it... which I suppose relates to the arguments about bundling that are still being resolved around cable tv.)

This magical filtering and movement also relate to why watching tv was such a pleasure for me before - although I had to tune in for a favorite show, to just watch something took no more effort than a few clicks of the remote.  In switching to watching online, the seductive brain rot of old TV is replaced with an endless process of overfilled netflix queues, too many show subscriptions on Hulu, and the sense that I am somehow behind on things with my online tv viewing (!). 

To think about cable, perhaps what happened with the proliferation of cable channels was an ever splintering specialization that gave us channels that would fit a mood or a wish, but lacked the generality of the average network. This was a gain, but it was also a loss, because how many hours of programming could one possibly sit through with the cooking network or fitTV? Then the more successful of these networks generalized up again - witness the personality chefs, to take the place of talk show hosts or news anchors. But that's when they lost me, because I'm not a just the lifestyle cooker, who learns about products to buy them at whole foods, but someone who wants technical details and expertise. 

So I imagine that there must be a balance between specialization and generality in show content and viewing audiences. But this is where online content is brilliant, because the same shows can now be recollected into different packages now, for example with a customized daily watching of 2-3 hours for type 1) the lifestyle cook, type 2) the travel and food culture type or type 3) the technical shows watcher. 

Well, this post is getting long and I'm not sure where I've gotten to, but I can at least say that this seems to be what happened with the networks vs. cable channels and police dramas. So perhaps the model isn't as unfamiliar for big media as one might imagine, and the details are more in who curates and how well they are able to construct viewing sets that are updated frequently enough for daily watchers, while still being able to engage those of us who might check in once a week. Here's hoping that we can create playlists for TV shows, and eventually someone will put together a regularly updated collection or channel of shows for me to watch online, so that I can, for example, have high quality nature programs for relaxing evenings. I'd probably even sit through the advertising.