The Colony: Social Media Experiment

At the risk of this post sounding like a shameless plug for Discovery, I still thought this was worth sharing.

There's a new season of "The Colony" airing on Discovery Channel tonight (10 pm). It's a show that takes real-life volunteers and puts them in a simulated pandemic environment and forces them to survive. It examines what would really happen to humanity if a horrendous virus actually broke out and destroyed our civilization. On the show, volunteers are asked to rebuild in the aftermath. A really scary concept to think about, especially since it could happen.

As a promotional tactic, Discovery launched a Facebook application that shows you how a pandemic would affect your friends and family. It shows you a fake Facebook page with updates from your friends and family trying to survive. Read Mashable's post on it here.

I logged into the application and it does make you think about what the world would be like during a viral outbreak and pandemic. Think swine flu x10 because this virus is actually infecting, killing, and taking names. You'd have to rely on a totally different skill set that many of us just don't have.

While I think this application is clever, I didn't really find it THAT believable. Mostly because friends of mine that I know don't know each other were commenting back and forth on posts. So that hampered the reality for me a bit. Also there were some things that sounded too cheesy, even for some of my friends to say.

I think this would have been so much better if it somehow integrated into your actual Facebook feed gradually. That would heighten the reality and make you actually think twice about whether this pandemic was actually happening. As it is now, you can exit the application by closing your browser. Although I guess if you couldn't easily tell this application to stop, then Discovery might inadvertently create a crisis from confused users.

Did you try it the application? What do you think of it?