Why Social Media Is Great for Trivia
Today’s attention-shy world is so vastly different from the one we inhabited 15, 10 or even 5 years ago. Constant interruptions, rings, pings and buzzes from devices, desktops and even subway platforms make this planet – especially New York City – an incredibly difficult place to focus on any one activity for an extended period of time, and trivia has taken a serious hit.
In a show of hands, how many of you can remember the last time you played Trivial Pursuit? Or watched an entire episode of JEAPARDY? Or fired up “Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego” on your computer? The fact is that we have more options now than ever before to spend our ever-limited amount of “leisure time,” and extended mental games of wisdom and memory are sadly no challenge to Angry Birds. It would seem, to the casual observer, that in the digital era, trivia is a lost cause.
Enter Web 2.0. The interactive Web has opened a new channel for trivia lovers, which I believe is keeping people’s interest and enthusiasm for the fun brain game alive and well. Whereas growing up we were beholden to a select few sources of trivia- namely, those found on cards printed by Hasbro or read out by Alex Trebec – today we have more sources of fresh, original trivia than ever before, highly relevant and extremely timely.
Facebook started this trend with their online “Quizzes,” but there are now many Facebook-based trivia games which are highly sought-after, and highly addictive (The Economist’s “Well-Red Quiz” of current events is a particularly popular one, played weekly by some 500,000 fans). Twitter has also been a boon for trivia, and a way for companies & individuals to extend their brands online in realtime with daily trivia: Answers.com, mental_floss magazine & MasterCard‘s feeds come to mind, as well as our own TrivWorks “Special Host” Pat Kiernan.
Our own TrivWorks Twitter feed has an extremely active following of trivia lovers who respond to our daily tweets- not because our trivia is so amazing (well, maybe) but because it’s THERE. And it’s there where people want it, namely on their mobile devices. We also encourage on our feed for our followers to send US trivia every day, and they respond in droves. Why? Because you don’t need to work at a trivia company to have great trivia questions! Correctly answering trivia questions feels awesome, but asking a perfect trivia question is even better- believe me, I know. The days of long-form trivia games may be waning, but people still love reading a few clever, relevant questions to break up their day.
Do you think that social media has helped or hurt trivia? Leave your response (and a good trivia question) here on my blog, or send it to us on Twitter.