Perhaps television as we know it today (TV series, the impulse of watch all episodes in one night, social networks to discuss what happens in each episode) and all these things that today, more or less since Netflix has been around, we take for granted, started on a specific day: September 22, 2004.
That day the first episode of Lost. If you haven’t seen it Lost, you missed something: you still have time, but that pioneering feeling of those who followed him then cannot be recreated, you can try to remember.
Before 2004, the TV had decided to focus everything on reality shows, like the Big Brother: they cost little, very little, and had a lot of public. Today some would call it junk TV. Lost changed the scheme: in the meantime, it cost a lot. It was a super production looking for an audience. Well until 2010, when the last episode of the last season aired, it was a popular phenomenon. Of that particular people who were already on the Net; that although broadband was a mirage, he knew how to find a way to stream episodes when they were broadcast in the United States without waiting for them to arrive in Italy weeks later; and who loved being in those still new territories, essentially uninhabited, which were social networks.
Dates are important: When Lost debuts, Facebook was born a few months ago and it was still a university project. But as the sci-fi adventures of passengers, survivors of a plane crash in the Pacific Ocean, went on, social networks began to become part of the lives of some of us: in addition to Facebook, there was Friendester, and then Twitter and for a while Friendfeed and Foursquare. And everything that happened on Lost, became the topic of social media. Trending topic. Normal today, but with Lost I think it was the first time. One of the creators of the series, ten years later, will say: “One of the things we didn’t anticipate was the advent of social media. We were creating a show that was intentionally mysterious and ambiguous. And suddenly there was this tool with which people could communicate on the internet. The two things coincided and Lost it was the perfect topic for social media of the time “.
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