Earlier this week, a couple of Tweets from Brooke Burke @brookeburke appeared in my Twitter stream. Dancing with the Stars was about to start, and at 45 minutes until showtime she was tweeting, that her daughter wouldn’t get out of her makeup chair – and then she posted a photo of said daughter in said chair. Then she retweeted a photo from her wardrobe stylist, asking which earrings she should wear on the show. Then she tweeted links to the stylist and her hair and makeup artists, and thanked them all, calling them the best glam squad in the world. And earlier in the day she tweeted about her pre-show meal, about her daughter meeting Taylor Swift at rehearsal, and watching Rod Stewert rehearse – it was a continual stream of backstage news.
Then right after the show, she tweeted… “Shocking show tonight! DWTS! Very emotional. Don’t miss it!!!”
And it was then that it hit me how much my world, and the world in general, has changed in the last five years.
A little over five years ago I was all wrapped up in Brooke’s previous show, Rock Star: INXS and covertly writing teasers for ROCKBAND.COM. Doing it secretly because I didn’t want the producers to know who I was, and not allow me access to the tapings. I hooked up with other “spoiler” kings and everything took off! It was a fabulous ride! 50,000 unique visitors a day coming to my site was great! All those people wanted the scoop, and the spoiler gods and I gave them something they couldn’t get anywhere else. We wrote about the music, about the performances, AND what happened in between. We wrote about what you saw on TV, and about what you didn’t. The next year the traffic doubled, I got backstage access, and I shot a backstage documentary. I remember it all – and it was fabulous!
But guess what? Only a few years later, Brooke Burke is doing my old job. Now she’s the one posting teasers and backstage images, and giving the world that glimpse behind the scenes at a favorite TV show.
Twitter has seriously changed the world. It’s easy to underestimate its power – it seems so trivial and superficial at first glance. But you can bet, if there’s breaking news, the very first place I’m looking is Twitter. Real people tweeting in real time – how much closer to the ground can you get? And even minor local events get coverage on Twitter. It’s not just the big things, deemed important enough by the media to make the cut – it’s a little bit of everything – major and minor, important and not-so-important.
I loved 2005 and writing about Rock Star: INXS and in 2006, Rock Star: Supernova. But if the show was still on today, things would be very different. Every single member of the studio audience could conceivably tweet in real time, after each performance. There would be no spoiler gods, but rather a rambling Twitter stream of comments from many voices – one of which would undoubtedly be Brooke Burke. And how cool is that?!
As much as I loved 2005, I think 2010 is even better. And I certainly didn’t see Twitter coming – so while I don’t know what comes next, I’m excited to see what does!