Oscars bring out the sheep
February 28, 2011If you wanted to buy a record or watch a movie before the days of the Internet, the only things to go off of were a few reviews and some friendly recommendations. Today, it’s almost impossible to avoid somebody giving his or her two cents.
Whether or not you watched the actual telecast Sunday night, there’s a good chance you heard that the Academy Awards were terrible. Maybe they were, maybe they weren’t, ultimately that’s up to the viewer to decide. At least it should be.
Everyday, more and more users of Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites fall victim to groupthink and, as a result, subjective-ness is becoming an endangered species. From the moment you logged onto Twitter last night, your timeline informed you of how awful the award show was, and promptly told you to hate it, too.
Nobody’s telling us to listen to that opinion, of course. We’re all human beings perfectly capable of formulating our own. Still, it’s never easy for our minds to unlearn what they already know. And what our minds already knew is that we were supposed to hate the Oscars.
It’s completely within the realm of possibility that somebody watched the ceremony and enjoyed it. If that opinion were shared on Twitter, however, there would have been plenty of people ready to meet it with amused superiority and a plethora of snide remarks.
“I don’t think it’s too early to call this the worst Oscars ever,” tweeted writer Joe Posnanski only minutes into the show.
”The worst Oscarcast I’ve seen, and I go back awhile. Some great winners, a nice distribution of awards, but the show? Dead. In. The. Water,” Roger Ebert told his 300,000+ followers.
Of course, it is possible that the Oscars were simply that bad. That general opinion only gets voiced louder though when everyone jumps on the bandwagon with you.
With so many people easily being able to interact with one another, Twitter can sometimes be a great tool used to debate polarizing issues. Instead, it often turns into a place where ideas seem to coagulate until there is just one Twitter Opinion.
