Emerging Norms in Social Media: The “Game of Thrones” Effect vs. the “Spoiler Alert” Effect.

Emerging Norms in Social Media: The “Game of Thrones” Effect vs. the “Spoiler Alert” Effect.

This past Sunday, something HUGE happened on HBO’s hit show, “Game of Thrones”. A lot of people saw the episode and went bat-crap crazy, but a lot of people who love and follow the show didn’t see the episode. I love and follow the show and I didn’t see the episode… but at 9:50pm on Sunday I get like 7 texts on top of each other and my Facebook feed and messaging go totally meshuga! Twitter is also going nuts! But, thankfully, all the texts, Facebook and Twitter posts were cryptic or were preceded by “SPOILER ALERT”; so nobody revealed and, more importantly, nobody wanted to reveal what HUGE event had just happened on “Game of Thrones”.

You could say it was collective self-restraint born of collective empathy for those who had not witnessed this event 1st hand, and whose enjoyment thereto would be irreparably diminished if the secret were to be revealed on Social Media before they had a chance to witness it 1st hand. Perhaps a reason for such self-restraint is coz we sort off know our Social Media friends, right?….. So we sort off care a little about them, right?.......... How long can such group self-restraint last in a world of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, 24hr cable, information saturation etc.? My experience: 1.5 days.

By early Tuesday, after badgering, hectoring and incessantly complaining to my fellow “Game of Thrones” addicts not to reveal what HUGE event happened on FB, they began to push-back and tell ME to “get off Facebook for a couple of days”. Two of my younger sisters (blood of my blood) were amongst the most vociferous. My youngest sister was like, “Yup bro, you are screwed! If you don’t wanna know what happened, get off Facebook for a bit!” I was getting Facebook shunned!

I was hurt coz I had to choose between not being a normal part of my sisters’ online lives for a couple weeks, and knowing what happened on a TV show that I love, and my sisters were cool with disappearing me for a couple weeks… how crazy is that? But I quickly realized that the whole point of Social Media is that… it is social! And what is more social than an event that cuts across all demographics and gets all demographics to collectively freak-out about the same event…. Like 100MM people saying a collective “WTF???”

It also became clear to me that Social Media encourages, accentuates, and profits from hive and herd behavior. But as an MBA student evicted from my normal “blood of my blood” herd, and now part of a large but scattered herd of strangers who were becoming annoying to everyone else because we happened not to be part of a HUGE social event on TV that the rest of our normal herds wanted to revisit, relive, replay etc….. I thought, “I don’t want to have to choose between being a full part of my online herd and missing out on the joy of singularly AWESOME events that I missed but are still available on DVR a week or even a month later.”

“How can this be fixed?” “How can I remain an active and awesome member of my online herd, without ruining the fun everyone else wants to have online?” and “How can the fix be profitable?”

I’m not smart enough to solve this. I still don’t know what happened on “Game of Thrones” this past Sunday, but I doubt I will make it to this coming weekend (b4 I finally watch the episode) without finding out what happened before. Someone smarter than I (and there are many of you at Kellogg) needs to solve this.