In honor of the Olympics I'm going to talk about how social media has been both a boon and a curse in covering the games.
Should we just get over ourselves? Or is this just the tip of something deeper?
Be Careful What You Say
It's really hard to look online nowadays without running into spoilers, whether it be the ending of the much anticipated The Dark Knight Rises or whether Michael Phelps won gold at his swimming match in London.
The time difference and limited broadcast coverage don't help either; reading the race results on Twitter earlier that day kind of ruins the experience of watching the race later.
And yes this has become "a thing."
Sure there's live streaming coverage of the Olympics from a variety of online sources, but that footage is low-quality. And not everyone has the time to sit and watch it during their day job. If you want high-res footage, sport stats and commentary, or just to be able to relax at home while watching the games then you must wait for NBC to get around to it that night.
And let's all admit it: a big part of the thrill of watching any sport is not knowing the outcome. That moment of suspense as the athlete reaches the finish line, or leaps into the air, or descends for that crucial landing...these are moments we live for. Knowing the outcome beforehand really ruins the gravity of those moments. It's why we can detest spoilers so much.
Just Look Elsewhere
So avoiding spoilers should be easy, right? In discussion, either verbal or written, it is customary to mention "Spoiler alert!" before revealing anything of dramatic importance. If you hear this over the radio, just mute it. If you see it in the newspaper, just don't read it the rest of the article. If you read that sentence on a blog, you click away to another page. No problem, right?
Unfortunately this doesn't happen in social media feeds, which come unabashed and without warning. While scrolling through your Twitter feed you can stumble across a single tweet proclaiming somebody's anger that the U.S. didn't win any medals in cycling. And just like that, you've been spoiled.
The tweeter likely wasn't out to spoil anybody's day. They were just expressing their emotions over an event, and that's pretty much the point of microblogging. So why not just avoid tweets with spoilers, isn't it easy like in other mediums? Not so.
Normal articles are long and have time to give your warning. Tweets are very short and more often than not have no room for warning. If an article has a spoiler alert, you can go elsewhere. If a tweet even had room to include a "splr alrt!" you've already read a huge chunk of the tweet and likely glanced at the rest of the text, still getting spoiled.
It's harder to just "glance over" a spoilsome tweet because you can't navigate away from it. It's still there either above or below the rest of your feed.
Unfollowing a tweeter is mostly out of the question because it's never consistent; it could be any one of your friends who just happened to exclaim over an event this one time. You can't predict who's going to erupt in a spoiler, and you can't ignore someone for such a single, minor offense that wasn't even intentional (at least you shouldn't).
Also some spoilers become trending topics. [SPOILER ALERT, skip ahead if you haven't followed Men's Swimming]. Here's a good example that just took place this week. Michael Phelps beating the all-time record for most medals can become its own trending topic in a social media channel as everyone raves over it, and then you really can't escape this spoiler.
[END SPOILER ALERT]. See what I did there? I was considerate and gave you that spoiler alert heads-up. Not everyone is as kind or always remembers to do so.
Just perusing over the latest trending topics gives it away, and you can't avoid something like this unless you already know about it. The only way to avoid spoilers on Twitter is to avoid Twitter altogether, and that's just too much of a cost for many people. It'd be like not reading the news that day; it's become a part of their routine and how they gather information about the world.
How Do You Look Away From Everywhere?
So this is a nuisance, yes, but is this really a problem?
It's an annoyance, yes, but it's a small price to pay for the convenience and efficiency of online mass media. In order for subjugated people to get news out of their totalitarian nation they need something like Twitter. That same freedom also allows some overly exuberant fan to tweet something the rest of us would rather learn for ourselves later.
So should we just get over ourselves and stop complaining? At a short-term level, yes. We live in an increasingly connected world, and as such time-zones are becoming less of a barrier. If something important happens overseas that news will be posted online, and there it is 'tangible' – at least in the sense that now a written post of it exists as opposed to the fleeting moment of verbal conversation.
In other words, news is now more asynchronous than ever. We are simply just not used to it.
But in another sense this could very well be a fundamental issue. As with the example of Twitter it's not as easy as it seems to just ignore a "part" of social media. It's virtually impossible without ignoring all social media altogether, even going to such lengths as to blind oneself to all social media outlets and mentions.
NBC scrolls a Twitter feed during its news broadcast. If one were to avoid Twitter for spoilers, they'd have to avoid watching the news. And now what seemed like a trifle suddenly has a much bigger cost.
The More Things Connect, The More They Become the Same
The key element here is that things are becoming more integrated, and it is – and will become – increasingly harder to filter pieces of them out. Eventually, in order to filter anything you would have to effectively blind yourself to everything. And that's never a good thing.
But what else is there to do? Let yourself be helplessly overwhelmed by all that information, or deliberately create gaps in your perceived environment. Either way it's a compromise to your convenience, whether it's in preference to information-intake on your own terms or in general awareness of your surroundings.
Our sensitivity to spoilers clearly illustrates at least one thing: human minds are not ready for everything, and in this instance they don't want to be. And yet that is where technology is headed.
So how do we handle it?