Will Social TV kill family life?

Really interesting concept this, the marrying of your trusty old TV and your social media site/feeds…

The idea behind this is that we are now in a generation, or an upcoming generation, of TV users that also sit with a laptop/smartphone watching TV but interacting on various social media sites like facebook, myspace, twitter, linkedin as we watch.

Sounds absurd that you can fully do both things at once, but I do it myself, watch a programme in the evening, and spend more time discussing it online than I do watching the programme in the first place! (Take Teenwolf last night!)

So how will this concept form? Will it mean integration of TV into the laptop? Website functionality on a split screen TV and keyboard?

More importantly how does it affect those in your family? Will we all become completely insular at home? Instead of watching the TV together and ‘talking’, will we actually sit together but be interacting within virtual discussions with our friends? Will we actually be sat together on the sofa, watching the same programmes on the TV and discussing them online with the person sat next to you on the sofa, in complete silence except for the tapping of keyboards?!!!

It hurts my brain.

It also saddens me slightly as when I was growing up my father would sit at the head of the table at meal times, get drunk, and basically tell my brother and I about all his adventures when he left Italy at sixteen, pretty much to the present day. Although we’ve heard the same stories every evening for years, I still have fond memories of those long dinners, and finally retiring to the sofa as a family to watch whatever was on, and if it was Sunday it was obviously ‘Ski Sunday’ (I’m humming the music now…!)

Is Social TV the start of an insular world for the next generation, the irony being that they are talking to potentially millions online, but not to the person sat next to them at home?

Something to think about anyway.

Pietro

Tags: family life, social tv

This entry was posted on Friday, January 15th, 2010 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Consumer Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.