Veronica Jauriqui

Veronica Jauriqui is Special Projects Manager at the Norman Lear Center.

Behind Ashton Kutcher's and Brittany Spears' Twitter feeds, President Barack Obama's is the fourth most popular feed, with more than 3 million followers. Is it any wonder, for a candidate who made social media a pillar of his successful bid for the presidency? It also made his admission last November all the more disconcerting when in front of a crowd of Chinese youth, the President admitted he had never used Twitter.

Much to-do was made of Candidate Obama's social media strategy to reach out to untapped constituencies and raise millions in political contributions. He had presence on scores of social media sites - MySpace, Facebook, BlackPlanet and Eons - with his my.BarackObama.com site hailed as the embodiment of online grassroots campaigning. The result was more than half-a-billion in donations, the majority made online and in amounts of $100 or less.

We can credit this success both to Obama's media savvy as well as to his crack team of social media strategists who appreciated how leveraging the technology and plugging into the digital dialogue could build momentum, especially with younger voters.

President Obama began his first day in office signing an executive order for all White House departments to create a "system of transparency, public participation and collaboration." Technocrats celebrated it as the dawn of a new era in politics. Then what?

A year after Obama's swearing in, it's been a lackluster showing by the administration on the social media front. Months after taking office, his Twitter feed remained surprisingly silent. No mention of what Bo the dog was up to, not even what the White House chef was making for lunch. Time magazine followed up on the White House social networking strategy in May 2009, calling President Obama's technological transformation "very much a work in progress." What happened?

Adam Rogers

Adam Rogers is Office Manager/Project Coordinator at the 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.

Scott McGibbon

Scott McGibbon is Project Specialist at the Norman Lear Center.

At the Lear Center, we've long been intrigued by the idea of a museum of entertainment. No, not some place with weathered props and stars in wax, but an online, comprehensive survey of everything that human beings have considered entertaining. Big idea.

This museum could give us a much clearer version of where we've been and, perhaps, where we're going in terms of entertainment and our culture. Maybe it could even help us sequence the genome of entertainment.

Then, during a recent staff meeting, it occurred to me that an astonishingly rich, complex, and increasingly complete museum of entertainment already existed - Hello, YouTube!

Here's something already in place that offers the promise of nearly every possible recorded example of what has entertained people ever, from Gilgamesh to Grey's Anatomy to Gotterdammerung.

But what's really available? I jotted down 60 random pieces of entertainment... and found samples of every one. What breadth! Here's the shortlist: Oedipus. Nat King Cole. Monster Truck Crashes. Persian Sufi Music. Groucho Marx. Nijinsky Dancing. Chinese Opera. The Dude. Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? What Would I Want? Sky. Fado.

So can we just link YouTube videos to relevant showbiz entries on Wikipedia and cut the opening day ribbon? Not really. Wikipedia is a true encyclopedia - basic info, often a bit dull, sometimes woefully incomplete - whereas a good museum demands deeply-researched and well-written brochures, listening tours and wall plaques to inform visitors and enrich their museum experience. That's what a museum of entertainment requires: everything about a museum of entertainment should be entertaining.

What our YouTube-based museum seems to desperately need is some sort of curator(s), maybe just a search engine overlay that allows you to type in "Woody Allen" and view his movies with annotations that link to clips from his inspirations like Bob Hope, the Marx Brothers, Bergman and Fellini, along with links to related reviews, interviews, monographs and academic papers. The piece of entertainment itself, the performance, could be placed on a timeline, linked to the events and entertainments that contributed to it and to everything that flowed from it.

Have you ever found anything like this museum prototype in your web browsing? If so, please send me a note (enter@usc.edu) with the link. Or if this is truly fresh territory, doesn't this challenge sound awesome? Any willing collaborators out there? Imagine what crowdsourcing could do in terms of constructing and curating this marvel.

It's a big job, but somebody ought to do it.