And as long as I'm talking about online chatter, ancillary fantasy worlds, and general obsessing about television, I'd be remiss to not mention this amazing video, which I was pointed to by my friend Francesca Coppa.
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/videos/2008/01/28/pressure-a-metavid-by-the-california-crew/
It's a "meta vid," a fan-made vid about the process of making fan-made vids, back in the days when people did it with two VCRs, a tape deck, and a stopwatch. The level of commitment to the task at hand makes me exhausted just thinking about it!
Along with its celebration of the ingenuity necessary to do something like this in the days before every Mac came with iMovie, it's also a useful reminder to those of us who go on and on about "user-generated content" and social media sharing on the interwebs that we're not necessarily creating the wheel here. We may have invented the radial tire, to stretch a metaphor way too far, but we're not creating the desire to interact with content -- we're just facilitating it. The new behaviors that arise when it doesn't take three people and a weekend full of diet soda to make a three-minute video -- well, those are a whole other ball of wax.