There is no such thing as Social TV

A series of posts at Trendspotting (link), along with a poorly conceived chapter in a book on social media (no link yet, study notes will appear later) has me thinking about the notion of "Social Television." Specifically, it's got me thinking that it's merely a notion, and not a "real" thing.

The concept of Social TV is the "enhancement" of broadcast programming with interactive features, such as the ability to interact with other viewers or post and access user-contributed reviews and ratings. But my point is: once you've added input devices such as a mouse or keyboard (or even an "enhanced" remote control that has similar input capabilities) to a television set, it's not a television set anymore, but a computer with a large monitor.

The qualities that define television as a medium are its broadcast nature (one sender to many receivers), scheduled programming (a program, or even coverage of an event, happens at a certain time), and the passive consumption by the audience (specifically, non-interactive).

The first quality (broadcasting) is not unique to the television medium. Any video presentation (or even a text one, such as a newspaper article or Web page) is a broadcast. The message is created by one person and transmitted to others. And if the others "interact" with the message, what they are in fact doing is creating a version of it and retransmitting it, becoming in effect a broadcaster of an altered message. Which is to say that, while television is a broadcast medium, not all broadcast media qualify as being "television."

The second quality (scheduled programming) was broken long ago, by home recording devices such as the VCR, which has evolved into the DVR, not to mention the release of television programs on hard media (a television series can be purchased on videotape or DVD), not to mention the availability via the Internet (on YouTube, Netflix, Hulu, or the broadcaster's own Web site). However, we make a clear distinction between the two: when a person is watching a sitcom episode on DVD or a Web site, they may be watching a program that originally aired on television, but they are not watching television.

The third quality (passive consumption) is perhaps the objective of the broadcasters, but is seldom fully realized. If an individual is watching television alone, and is wholly mesmerized by the program, that is passive consumption. But if other people (or just one other person) are in the room, they interact with one another only when the programming fails to hold their attention (commercial breaks, dull moments in the program, etc.), and in some instances, such as a thoroughly rotten movie, the interaction among viewers is more entertaining than the program. But it stands to note that this is not interacting with the program, but interacting with other people. In a holistic sense, the activity seems to involve both, but there are distinct differences between the moments when the viewers are actually watching television and other moments in which they are interacting with one another and not paying attention to the program.

The notion of Social TV undermines all three of these qualities that essentially define television as a medium. The activities that Social TV presumes to have introduced are already available on the Internet - a person can watch video content, post their ratings and tags, and interact with other viewers on a myriad of different Web sites. While there may be differences in the device or the room one might be sitting in, these are entirely incidental.

Which leads me to my conclusions. First, should "Social TV" become popular, I submit that it is not because the television medium has evolved and survived, but that television has died and been replaced by something that cannot rightly be considered to be "television" at all. Second, that the notion of Social TV is not new, but merely a label being placed on an activity that is already taking place in the Internet medium.