I watched the Grammys last night, and while I really liked most of the performances, I am not writing a review of the program. I am, however, interested in highlighting the participatory nature of this program – the producers took engagement further than I have ever seen. Engagement is the buzzword in media circles these days and it refers to the ways in which consumers engage deeply and in a sustained manner with products, media included. Simple examples include fan groups on Facebook and Twitter sites. This year’s Grammys had these and much more. For example, you could vote right up to the time Jennifer Nettles announced live the winning song that Bon Jovi would sing. Viewers were also able to submit videos of themselves as they danced to a Black Eyed Peas song; those selected were viewed on a wall behind the actual performance. You could also download a pdf file with all the nominees and their categories in order to fill out your ballot and measure your ability to guess the winners against the actual selections. Then there was the dedicated Grammys.com website that, among other features, had a live feed of the Grammy awards given prior to the evening’s program. The producers pulled out every trick in the book on this one. On the one hand, I think engagement is a good thing, especially when it allows--that is empowers--consumers to co-produce content. But I wonder if at some point we won’t tire of this process. After all, entertainment was about relaxation – whatever happened to good old vegging out? If it becomes a requirement of viewing that I participate in the event through consumer generated content, voting, uploading videos of myself, Tweeting, Facebooking, and on and on and on…It’s exhausting. Makes me yearn to be a couch potato. All I want to do is watch and enjoy. Media producers, pundits and scholars will be using all of these ancillary activities in order to create sophisticated measures of engagement, and to use those measures to determine the success or failure of a program. The need to measure physical behavior, whether it is the way consumers click-through websites we visit or physically connect by voting or generating content or by some other means, engagement is the rule of the day. I think engagement can take place deep inside us as we veg-out in front of the TV, getting lost in our thoughts and daydreams. It’s certainly more difficult to measure our internal musings, but the kind of engagement that takes place inside us is a valuable part of our meaning making system. As we process media content, I believe we are making sense of the world in which we live. All the other means of measuring engagement are based on what’s out there and measurable, like click-through rates or Twitter posts and the like. These are experiences, but they may not be meaningful. And, that leads me to think that media consumption is becoming a series of experiences without much meaning. From a critical view point that suggests we are living in an increasingly shallow world that beckons us to have more and more experiences, when what we yearn for is meaning in our lives.
