Why Scandal is the perfect opportunity to introduce coding to everyone.
The Paleo Diet for Social Media
This Thursday, millions of single ladies, girlfriends (husbands, boyfriends, and other males…our Thursday plans are no more) will tune in to one of the biggest television series premiers of our generation. I also believe that this official Scandal holiday could be the perfect opportunity to introduce coding to the next wave of engineers and entrepreneurs.
I recently tried to incorporate the Paleo Diet into my lifestyle and learned some very interesting things about food (and myself). I won’t bore you with a health class (that’s what Google’s for) but Paleo allows you to only eat things that were raised or caught from the wild. You basically have to “eat like a caveman.” That means no processed foods, no grains, peanuts, legumes, or dairy. At first it was a pretty difficult lifestyle to incorporate, due to the accessibility of unhealthy options and my love for PB&J sandwiches. However, after a few weeks of sticking with the program I realized that going for the easy protein bar or quick snack was not as satisfying as taking the time to prepare a quality, nutritious meal.
So what does Paleo have to do with Olivia Pope or coding? The third season premier of Scandal had 10.5 million television viewers and nearly 713,000 tweets about the episode reaching a Twitter audience of 3.7 million people. Each following episode received an average of 2,200 tweets/min, with a high population of these social media interactions coming from a diverse background.
Just imagine if we placed #blacktwitter on a “Paleo diet for Social Media” for the Season 4 Premier of Scandal this Thursday. In order for anyone to Tweet a status update with the hashtag #scandal you would have to enter in one line of code already provided by Twitter (you see the code under the tweet, you type it in, and the Tweet sends). Although many people would absolutely hate this, and it would dramatically decrease the amount of tweets that evening, the people who actually shared their excitement for B613 would have done something in the life for the first time that they never would have imagined…code.
Most consumers of social media never think to consider that these status updates are actually generated code written by people, which might be why there is such a small interest in coding with the general population. Providing the option for Twitter (or even Facebook’s user-base) to craft one or two lines of code before processing an update would be a giant step in enlightening future engineers to comprehend the functionality behind the tweets they post on a regular basis. If we remove the mystery that Tweets just don’t “ happen magically” then Scandal’s Season Premier + Twitter could introduce coding into 3.7M people’s consciousness.
This concept around typing code to post an update creates the first ever educational layer for over-consumed social networks. I know a lightbulb would spark for at least one person in Twitterland to have them turn off the TV and reverse engineer their Tweet from one line of code, to two, three, until they taught themselves to code an entire tweet. Then when we share their success story we can say that it wasn’t a CS degree, but #scandal that helped discover the next big tech superstar.
Health. Wealth. Success. Prosperity.
Chris
