The Butt Ugly Weblog

MST3k in your living room?

Weird experience: You sit alone in your living room, watch TV and have your laptop handy. Then you and your friends across Finland comment on the same frigging TV program, because everyone on the same IRC channel is watching it.

I am sure this is common to many people, but it's actually a firster to me. While this is so extraordinarily geeky that words cannot even transcribe the geekiness factor, I have to agree that this is probably the sign of the times to come. It is as if we were all in the same living room, but it's just less noisy. You can freely ignore others, or partake in the conversation as you wish. You can look up the movie data from IMDB, or look for the actor's web site, or just idly converse about other things that interest you in the movie. But it is not disturbing in the same sense as when you have a room full of people, all chatting and commenting wildly, which - at least for me - tends to be a concentration-and-enjoyment-ruining experience.

Even if IRC (and other IM systems) are a visual media, and to follow the conversation you need to look at your computer screen instead of the TV, it distracts you a lot less than audio, because you can ignore the monitor at will. But you can't ignore people who talk - there is really no way to selectively listen to the movie only (and making everyone wear headphones is kinda stupid).

We want to be connected, but not disturbed. We want the power to choose who to listen to, and who to ignore. Perhaps this is why weblogging is so popular - it allows you to tune in to only those people you care about. The rest of the world you can forget.

And this is an easy sentiment: weblogging was created and popularized by busy people. People with low tolerance towards bullshit. People with the need to network, and to weed out the stuff that is not interesting. If you look at the new technologies, like RSS, they are also geared towards more efficient networking, and filtering of information, and most importantly, to share things with the people you value and care about.

Hm. Perhaps there is something deep in all this - these are just the obvious surface thoughts that I quickly skimmed. Need to meditate on this some more.