Niche media and the Super Bowl

The Super Bowl burnout issue is another one I can talk about in theory without necessarily having any personal history with. My media consumption when I was a teenager was mainly syndicated television and whatever I was reading from the library. In college, I tuned out the mass media, in part because I was in a forest in western Massachusetts, in part because I had always-on internet for the first time, and in part because I could rely on my friends to tell me what was happening in the world at our daily lunch gatherings. Needless to say, I didn't have a lot of football-watching friends, so I missed the Super Bowl Media Explosion then, too. And then after college, my media habits were starting to form into the niche consumption that Migs talks about.


Well hello

Anyway, I started this intending to agree with Migs: it's really difficult to shove things down people's throats these days. I know about "Tik Tok" and Ke$ha, but only because I happened to hear an essay comparing the song to Avatar on NPR a few weeks ago. They played snippets during the broadcast, but I've never heard the song all the way through. And it's not like I'm one of those people who rejects pop music (i.e. I'm not That Asshole).

The big sports stories that I can remember from the past week and a half are Brett Favre's post-NFC Championship Game pictures (which I didn't look at -- I need to see that grossness?) and Joe Mauer's fake ten-year extension with the Twins. As you might guess, my news comes mostly from Twitter at this point.

I don't know how Twitter figures into this, though. Is it just an evolution of blogs and the like, down to how certain things become hits and others fly entirely under your radar depending on who you follow? Or is there more to it than that? Certainly it's more personal -- I'm much more confident that Peter King reads his @replies than I am that he reads comments on his columns or blog posts. (I got an obnoxious direct message from Ric Bucher the other day, for instance, and my list of "awesome celebrity encounters on Twitter" includes Bill Willingham, Michael Cudlitz, Colson Whitehead, and Tom Lenk.) But putting aside the interactivity point, I haven't figured out whether Twitter represents an evolution in what we see and read and hear in the way that the widespread availability of internet access represented an upgrade over television and newspapers, or the way that the invention of blogs represented an upgrade over a web culture that revolved around a couple of major sites.