How I "watched" the Superbowl

Well, the Superbowl just ended and I had zero access to a tv to watch it, since I’m currently sitting on a megabus. I wanted to keep track of the game, so I tried my best attempts to follow online, with interesting results.

First I caught up on my Facebook feed, where I got to see pictures of my friends’ Superbowl parties and see all the food/companionship I was missing out on. I also was able to start hearing which commercials were the best and how amazing Beyonce was during the half time show.

During this time, I switched occasionally to NFL.com to see the score update.
When I got bored with that, I went to Hulu.com where they were featuring the Superbowl commercials, and watched the ones my friends recommended.

Then I went back to Facebook, and saw some buzz about the power being out at the Superdome. I switched to CNN.com to confirm the “breaking news” since I wasn’t entirely sure what was going on.
This is when the fun started. I switched to Twitter and saw that #LightsOut and #BlackOut were trending. I read those feeds and got a healthy dose of entertainment from strangers all over the country (maybe even the world?). My favorite post was by @heathermarter when she said “I never expected to black out in New Orleans…said no one ever.” I retweeted it and went along through the rest of the feed. I also really liked the jokes about Bane and Batman. I tried to come up with my own jokes, but felt too much pressure and couldn’t do it.

After 30 minutes of laughing and wondering what on earth was going on, CNN reported that the power was restored and the game was resuming.

From here I went back to Facebook to see how my friends in SF were faring with the bad score. Through this, I was happy to learn that the blackout actually helped the Niners and they were catching up!

For the last quarter, I watched more Hulu commercials and refreshed nfl.com to see the score. With 2 minutes left, I switched to NFL’s play by play and caught updates through the end of the game.
Then I switched back to Facebook to see if any riots were breaking out in SF (only small ones that I saw).

And that’s how I watched the Superbowl without so much as seeing a coin toss.

What I learned: 
When I’m disadvantaged with a lack of technology, but my friends are not, they are a fine source of information. My newsfeed was catered to my interests already, and proved useful. However, when I became hungry for more info and my friends weren’t posting minute-to-minute updates, switching to Twitter was a great option for crowd-sourcing information and reading some of the wittiest comments.

I also decided that the NFL needs to learn that providing feeds of games is good for them and only increases their viewership/advertising value, and not make me feel so disadvantaged when I actually have a tiny computer at my fingertips. But maybe first they should focus on paying their electricity bills.