I was watching the Big Bang Theory the other day (side note: really good show, great for nerds, I like it dispite its sitcom nature), and I just happened to check Twitter during a commercial. Actually, to maintain my geek cred, while my wife was fast forwarding through commercials on the Tivo. Anyway, a friend mentioned how he was looking forward to watching BBT later tonight. I started to reply to him to tell him that it was good. The show came back on, but instead of returning my attention, I finished tweeting.

So, I missed a few moments of a show because I was tweeting about how good the show was instead of actually watching it.

All this is trivial, yes, but this might be a trend. Is talking/posting/tweeting/IMing/emailing/discussing events becoming more important than the actual events? During Obama’s address to Congress, all people were talking about were the Congressmen tweeting during his speech, and drown out some of the message and importance of the actual event. If anything marginally exciting happens in the world, places like Twitter and Digg light up.

Is the meta now more important than the data it describes?