On Sunday, American golfer Lexi Thompson had a three-shot lead at the ANA Inspiration tournament (one of the five majors in professional women’s golf) in California. Things were looking good for her to win, as she had in 2014. Then a four-stroke penalty — a two-stroke penalty for incorrect ball placement and an additional two-stroke penalty for an incorrect score card — set her back. She lost to So Yeon Ryu of South Korea in the end.
This isn’t an abnormal narrative in golf, but what is abnormal is that the penalty was assessed and applied because someone watching the game on television had seen Thompson place it wrong on the 17th hole the previous day. The Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA) issued a statement to this effect; Thompson was directly penalized due to audience participation.
To be clear, Thompson certainly broke the rules, intentionally or not. It’s just that she likely wouldn’t have been caught were it not thanks to one intrepid viewer. But now more than ever, television is an interactive experience. If there’s a defining metric for measuring 21st century success, it's engagement. With the ability to do your own live commentary during debates, talk to celebrities on social media, and make memes out of last night's Game of Thrones episode, television is basically an extension of the internet. Even the most boring of shows long ago became part of a vast augmented reality game.
Technically speaking, the term “augmented reality” applies in most cases to instances where the Real World™ is supplemented with a computer overlay. Google Glass, for example, is an augmented-reality device under this definition. But according to John Carey, a communications and media management professor at Fordham University in New York City, it’s likely that our definitions of such things will shift sooner rather than later.
“The lines are blurring everywhere,” Carey said. Augmented reality in this case would be used as a contextual frame for television rather than just a physical room. “What’s interactive TV versus a video game? What is interactive TV versus the interactive web? The web has more and more video, and you can choose specific things.”
“At some point, the distinction may just go away,” he said. “There’s all this video stuff, and some of it’s displayed on a television set and some of it’s displayed on a computer monitor, and they’re really one and the same. It’s just maybe they’re delivered slightly differently.”
Television is basically an extension of the internet
While this is a relatively new development, the expectation that television be interactive isn't new. Carey points to Winky Dink and You, a 1950s children’s cartoon show, as an example of what many people consider to be the first interactive television show.
“What you were supposed to do was get a special Winky Dink set which consisted of a plastic screen which was held on by static to your TV set,” Carey said, “and then you had these magic Winky Dink crayons.” Viewers were meant to draw on the special screen to complete objects like bridges for Winky Dink to then cross. “It seems kind of silly if you’re an adult, but if you’re six years old it actually was pretty magical.”
That said, the nature of the screen is what did Winky Dink and You in. “The show ultimately failed because a lot of kids did not get the Winky Dink plastic screen,” says Carey, “and they simply drew on the television sets, and their mothers were furious, and the show demised very quickly.” Several other interactive attempts were made over the following decades, like the television system QUBE or the series Captain Power and the Soldiers of the Future, but none truly succeeded.
“Interactive TV was dead completely at the end of the ‘90s, and the web won in terms of these interactive things,” Carey says. “But slowly but surely people in television have looked at what’s going on on the web and said, ‘We could do that too.’” This supplementary content commonly comes in the form of commentary or the like, with live-tweeting campaigns or live chats with actors while the show is airing. “It’s so much easier to do this interactivity as a complement from the web.”
That isn’t to say there haven’t been successful examples of audience participation, though it’s commonly delayed rather than live. In 2004, the Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode “Great Barrier” had two endings filmed with viewers voting on which one would be the canonical telling. Similarly, an episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit that aired the same year ended before the verdict with an official online poll determining the outcome.
By far the most popular example might be American Idol. The show had viewers vote for their favorite singers throughout the its 15-year run, and it was immensely successful, spending several years at the top of the ratings. Interactivity can be very, very lucrative in some cases.
But sometimes that interactivity means a golfer loses a tournament they might otherwise have won.
