Awkward Waltz

What you have above is a silly sequence of events. My roommate pointed this out to me tonight and I found it ridiculously funny, so I thought I would post it up here. Even though it is slightly old news, it still brings up some valid points about inter connectivity of media.

It starts with Chris Matthews, the host of the MSNBC's Hardball visiting the talk show of Ellen Degeneres, which is owned by the Warner Brothers. Now of course stuff like that happens all the time, celebrities visit the shows of other celebrities, politicians visit the shows of journalists. But when the show goes south, not only the audience of Ellen Degeneres witnesses the incident, the next day, so does the standard Chris Matthews audience. Then, to really top it all off, the youtube audience, which is absurdly vast, also gets the witness the blessed event.

I know this doesn't seem all that revolutionary, but I had one of those "oh!" moments when watching all of this. We can talk all we want about how completely connected we are, at however shallow a level, to everything. But it is small things like this, like the Ellen Degeneres Show, that make me realize information and stories can be swapped and traded and gussied up and shown in the blink of an eye. But for operations that big, someone has to be running the show, and I can't help feeling that that someone isn't me. Stories like Ellen and Chris can be told over, and over again, passed through whatever medium people would like to use, because they are stories that don't harm any large media corporation's interests. Try to find those stories, like videos of what is going on at Guantanamo Bay, and they won't pop up with thousands of hits on YouTube.

At any rate, Ellen and Chris were able to entirely exploit their story, bank on the awkwardness of the situation, and broadcast it to multiple types of audiences. They definitely know what mass media is all about.