The Blue Jays are playing on Facebook today

The day is finally here! Welcome to the real-life embodiment of the futuristic hell George Orwell described in 1984! I mean, yeah, that’s a tad dramatic, but the Blue Jays and Royals are playing a game today and you can only watch it on Facebook. If you want to watch the Jays complete the sweep against the shitty Royals, you simply have no other choice than to let Zuckerberg syphon your personal data for a three-hour block of time.

If you’ve read either of my two posts about this MLB/Facebook deal, you’ll know my sentiments towards what’s going on. I find this incredibly disturbing for a variety of reasons, but largely because I find Facebook as a whole completely repugnant.

Regardless, this is the way it is, and it’s only going to get worse from here. This is an incredibly lucrative deal for Major League Baseball as the social media juggernaut is cutting a fat cheque for the exclusive rights to these games. Major League Baseball gets to reach people where they spend a lot of time, which is Facebook, while Facebook gets a nice three-hour block of time to gather data that can, in turn, be sold off to clients for marketing purposes.

As people continue to migrate from consuming information on cable television to social media applications, providers of media will actively look for different ways to reach their customers. The important thing here isn’t the media itself, instead it’s the way by which that media is produced and way we consume it. This represents another step in a massive shift for consuming media with completely different implications than ever before. The medium is the message!!!!1

Anyways, if you hate Facebook, you can enjoy the game on the radio with Dan Shulman, which isn’t a terrible alternative.