A View From the Phlipside #3

These are the scripts from my weekly media commentary program on WRFA-LP Jamestown

My name is Jay Phillippi and I've spent my life in and around the media. TV, Radio, the movies and more. I love 'em and I hate em' and I always have an opinion. Call this the view from the Phlipside

Color me still undecided about this whole Twitter thing. Yes I have a Twitter account for this program (@radiophlipside) although I'm very spotty about posting there. It begins to strike me more and more as the all the worst about blogging. Tiny little nuggets of self involved trivia that just don't offer much chance for anything deep or profound. My own Twitter experiment is still undecided at the moment.

But without even having seen it I'd like to say I'm completely against Fox TV's concept of the "tweet-peet". Earlier this month when the series "Glee" and "Fringe" debuted for the season the network had members of the cast answering questions from viewers that scrolled across the screen during the show. What a wonderful endorsement for how little attention is required to follow the story line of your show. You don't even have to be half paying attention it appears. I remember that TRL on MTV used to do something similar to the is on a creeper across the bottom of the screen. If memory serves most of the comments were either idiotic or sophomoric. So hardly a sterling precedent. My fear is that what if people really like chatting back and forth on my TV screen while I'm trying to watch the show?

Well the good news is that I may not have to worry about it. The early reviews are in and the general reaction seems to be negative. First of all the questions and answers didn't stay conveniently out of the way, way down at the bottom. In fact they took up a fair bit of space and interfered with watching the show. What's worse is that after hyping the new feature on all the major social media the first quarter hour didn't have anything in it all, just normal TV. So you start off by really annoying your viewers by promising something, then holding out. Then the cast decided to spend the first couple minutes saying hello to their family and friends rather than tweeting with the fans and answering questions. Do you see where we're headed with this? Add in the big, irritating display plus answers would appear without any relation to the original question so it got confusing pretty quickly.

How badly did the fans of Glee take it (Oh by the way your new world vocabulary word for the day - Gleek. That's the network's word for fans of the show. You like Glee? You're a gleek. Lovely)? Let me put it to you this way - one poster on a fan web site compared the tweet-peat to one of the most despised characters of the modern communications world - Microsoft Word's annoying little mascot Clippy.

Look's like we might all be spared this latest catastrophe.

Call that the view from the Phlipside