First of all; yeah I know this has little/nothing to do with music and there are updates on the way.. I’m finally getting my music section put together and it’s gonna be real real nice! Revised Kanye remix on the way, as well as a handful more stuff including original tracks. Ya! Anyway, onto the rant.
OK so here’s my theory: Gossip Girl predicted Twitter. And grassroots protesters set the precedent for Twitter, thus.. paving the way for Gossip Girl.. I guess? Allow me to explain.
One of my favorite novelties in Hollywood is their approximation of technology. I can’t even remember how many times in 80s film and television you’ll find someone booting up a computer instantly; entirely unheard of at the time. It’s an understandable stretch, because who wants to devote 4 minutes of screen time to an Apple II-c making funny mechanical noises? It didn’t stop there though; writers seemed to either not care about relating their tech to reality or know the difference. As an audience member being asked to suspend one’s disbelief for something like John Connor’s ATM hacking—what was it, inserting a card attached to a cable ribbon attached to a word processor or something?—in Terminator 2 was pretty standard fare. This soon evolved into entirely fabricated operating systems (it’s my guess that it’s just easier to have the CGI guys throw something together than to try and film a computer screen without things looking all wonky) and platforms that are often pretty removed from what’s feasible or possible. Movies set in the future were great at this too: so often techonology that was purposefully ridiculous or impossible has been surpassed by real, actual development (still no hoverboards though, damnit!).
There’s also many instances of contemporary technology being more imagined than documented; where a writer will try to pass something as standard fare for whatever reason. Up until recently I felt that way about Gossip Girl; specifically the eponymous blog often heard as narration throughout the program. Writing about the Upper West Side elites who make up most of the show’s cast, the anonymous author sends out brief and catty updates dishing out rumors and secrets everyone’s cell phones, and receives tips in the same way.
This was one of those ridiculous, infeasible occurrences to me for a few reasons. While sending and receiving multimedia mail is a simple and obviously believable activity for rich kids to be engaged in, a year and a half ago when the show began there was no easy way to broadcast messages over SMS besides mass texting. Big corporate sites have been doing it for awhile, but for something a kid would put together to correspond with his or her Blogspot site? Pretty unthinkable. But whatever, I thought, it was an interesting premise nonetheless and still seemed pretty feasible, at least in the near future.
Fast forward to this Summer, in between GG seasons a hybrid SMS/web service called Twitter began booming in popularity. While not the first platform to mix text messaging and the social web, it quickly became the first to crossover into non-nerd (or at least very specialized interest) territory. Users texting Twiiter about their scandalous, late night escapades is on its way to becoming as common as the drunk dial. Others can then become “followers” of someone’s Twitter feed, and get updates sent directly to their phones. Were Gossip Girl to exist in real life, it would definitely involve Twitter. I’m not saying I think the people who started Twitter saw Gossip Girl and decided to start a web 2.0 venture, but the concept of a platform like it being used en masse is definitely one of the show’s selling points.
But where did the whole concept of the SMS/web hybrid come from? Back as far as 2004 I was aware of homespun services for mass text messaging. TXTMOB is the example I’m thinking of here; a grassroots, decentralized messaging system implemented over SMS as a means of quickly passing on information. Specifically this was used to a certain degree of success in coordinating the protests of both the DNC and RNC conventions that Summer: someone would say, spot a mass arrest going down at a certain intersection and send out a text about it. alerted instantly would be legal observers, street medics, independent media, and whoever else had subscribed.
I was expecting a more commercial, apolitical implementation of TXTMOB to come about much sooner than 4 years after it was first experimented with at the DNC and RNC protests. But in the meantime using such a platform had to become acceptable and practical; I remember using TXTMOB was some of the first text messaging I ever did and I’m generally pretty up on such things. So all the elements for a SMS/Web platform to become mainstream just weren’t there yet. These days people not involved in Twitter generally are a little bewildered as to what it’s for, but can grasp the concept and be sold on it in a couple minutes. And while it’d be a huge stretch to say Gossip Girl’s responisble for that, it’s not a huge stretch to say GG participated in shifting the paradigm to the point that it’s at now.
Where am I going with all this? Haven’t a clue. I mostly just wanted to get this stuff out so I’m not thinking about writing it any more, and I can say, “Toldja so!” when Wired writes a retrospective on the subject in a few years..
