by Adam Amel Rogers, Originally posted by the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center

Social media is demolishing the layers of barriers between the fans and the famous.

In my parents' generation, if you wanted to contact your favorite celebrity, you joined the fan club, paid the dues and maybe got an autographed picture in the mail months later. When I was a teenager, in the late '90s, I was a huge fan of MTV personality Dave Holmes, so I wrote him a letter and sent it to MTV Networks. No response. I tried emailing it to the general MTV email address - only to receive a canned response. Today, I am "friends" with Dave on Facebook and Twitter. Our symbiotic relationship allows him to keep me and other fans abreast of everything he is up to while making me feel as though I have a backstage pass.

People on both sides of the social media bridge have begun to realize the power of these fledgling connections. Fans have recognized that they have the power to affect the entertainment they consume, while PR agencies and marketing experts understand that online viral campaigns are just as important as billboards and TV advertisements, if not more so.

Last month, it was announced that icon Betty White will host Saturday Night Live. The reason? A 29-year-old man in San Antonio started a Facebook page demanding it. How could Lorne Michaels not try to get Betty White on the show after 500,000 people signed onto the effort? White's May 8th episode will be a ratings goldmine for NBC, because so many viewers feel like they helped make it a reality.

This isn't the only successful grassroots campaign. In 2009 NBC's My Name is Earl was initially saved by a Twitter petition, or as the organizers coined it, a "twitition." Also last year, fans of the comedy Chuck organized online to encourage people to purchase sandwiches from Subway, the show's main sponsor, and put "Save Chuck" cards into the Subway comment boxes - resulting in a new season of Chuck and an increased advertising relationship with Subway. Current online campaigns for Better Off Ted and As the World Turns are hoping to end up more like Jericho, which was famously saved in 2007 after fans sent in two tons of nuts (the edible kind) to network executives, and less like the efforts for Pushing Daisies, whose fans were unable to save the show.

Media content creators clearly understand the clout of online affinity communities - building new mavens through online campaigns is imperative for any new show. For example, in conjunction with the premiere of ABC's Flash Forward, a popular Facebook application was created that used all of the information, friends and pictures on user pages to create a vision of the user's future in the spirit of the show's plot.

Most of the power of the social media bridge is found in day-to-day examples. Did something on the last Grey's Anatomy episode irk you? Tell Shonda Rhimes, the show's creator and executive producer, all about it in a tweet and chances are she will respond. Many writers and producers find it de riguer to have direct conversations with fans via Twitter, leaking timely tid-bits about upcoming shows.

This new breed of intimate access should surprise no one. The Lear Center's report on the Business & Culture of Social Media explains how the rise of the social web has accelerated the transformation of audiences. Web 1.0 technology gave them the power to find more information about their favorite entertainment; now they're using Web 2.0 technology to have a direct impact on the media they love. And whether celebrities and media movers-&-shakers like it or not, these intimate relationships are here to stay.

by Adam Amel Rogers, Originally posted by the USC Annenberg Norman Lear Center

Most Americans learned that the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team beat Russia in real-time when commentator Al Michaels emphatically screamed "Do you believe in miracles?" The victory was arguably the best moment in U.S. Olympic history and people all over the country cheered in unison. If that same epic moment were to happen today, many Americans would probably find out like this:

RT @ESPN Do u believ 'n miracles? @USA beats @USSR 4-3! #CoolOlympicMoment

Technology has put every bit of necessary (and unnecessary) information at our fingertips, and while the benefits of our Immediate Gratification Culture are immense, one major drawback is the demise of synchronized media experiences that allow us to applaud or groan in unison with the rest of the viewing community.

Social media platforms feed on entertainment content. A Lear Center informal study of Twitter's trending topics in May/June 2009 revealed that 56% of the most talked about topics on Twitter were entertainment focused. Social media offers people the opportunity to find affinity communities to share their confusion about the latest Lost episode or their disgust over who heard auf Wiedersehen that week on Project Runway. However, it also dramatically increases the possibility that those same shows will be spoiled for other viewers.

Some consider it uncouth to post a spoiling Facebook status in our time-shifting culture, while others are of the "if you don't want to know, then don't DVR the show" school of thought. The latter is probably fair in the case of time-shifters - if it takes you three days to finally watch who was kicked off American Idol, then you don't have much room to complain about a social media spoiler. However, if you live on the West Coast, you should feel free to continue complaining about spoilers induced by discriminatory time-zone practices.

Networks have been time-zoneist since the beginning of television. All content is created for the Eastern Time Zone and it trickles down from there. I understand the overall reasoning, but exceptions need to be made for appointment-viewing TV shows.

A 2008 Lear Center report entitled "The Future of Television" says that "appointment television" has mostly been killed by the Internet and DVRs, but that "sporting events such as the Super Bowl and the NBA playoffs, and unscripted shows like American Idol and the Academy Awards can still bring a whole family together in front of a TV."

One of the punishments of living in Los Angeles is that even though we host all the award shows, we don't get to watch any of them in real time (except for those lucky few with East Coast feeds). Therefore, if Pacific viewers want to watch without spoilers, they have to live in an isolation booth for hours before the show begins. It isn't a case of just avoiding Facebook and Twitter; the ticker on CNN will show results, major newspaper sites will announce winners and media email alerts will fill your inbox with dreaded spoilers.

I will give credit to many on the East Coast who are cognizant of this and will try hard during award shows to not give away too much, but even their vague status updates can be problematic. For example, when my Facebook news feed was filled with "I can't believe Kanye did that" statuses during the MTV Video Music Awards, it still spoiled the impact of seeing him steal the microphone from that young woman who stole Beyonce's rightful award.

There are calls for someone to steal the Olympics from NBC. Viewers understood time-delay content during the Torino and Beijing Olympics, but since Vancouver is in the Pacific Time Zone, the lack of live content has been surprising. I am an avid Olympics enthusiast, but I have yet to see an important moment from the Vancouver Olympics in real-time.

While I was watching the qualifying round for the Snowboard Cross, a tweet from the Wall Street Journal informed me that American Seth Wescott had won Gold... in the Snowboard Cross. While I was gearing up for Bode Miller's Olympic return, ESPN.com told me that he won a bronze medal. All Olympic drama has been removed because NBC is saving all top content for their primetime Olympic slot - which is when the most people are watching, but how many of those people already know the results?

I hope future technological advancements will somehow level the playing field and allow people to consume the content that they want on their own timeline, without spoilers.

Is there an app for that?