TrendsonTwitter.com

Back in 1988, Joel Hodgson, a funny guy in Minneapolis, came up with a local television show called “Mystery Science Theater 3000.” In the goofy plot, a janitor was launched into space by a couple of evil scientists and marooned there, forced to watch an endless run of exceptionally bad B-movies.

Faced with a lonely eternity, the character, played by Mr. Hodgson, built robots to watch the movies with, and they begin cracking wise over the soundtrack.

They now have plenty of company. Today, the peanut gallery, digitally enabled by social media, is casting real-time shadows onto the screen of popular culture.

As my colleague Brian Stelter wrote in the new York Times recently, the Internet, which was thought to be a TV killer, is turning out to be its wingman, helping build huge, and in some cases record, audiences for large events like the Super Bowl, the Grammys and the Olympics. (How else to explain the baffling ardency for curling?) During the Oscars last week, there were as many as 70,000 posts an hour on Twitter, according to Trendr.

Television, historically an extremely passive way of consuming media, could become something else, a hybrid form of professionally produced content and crowd-sourced comments. right now, a crawl sometimes shows up at the bottom of the news, but in the not too distant future, it could be your friends’ comments that are streaming by, or a curated feed of commentary from a third party, or algorithmically popular Twitter messages that bubble up in real time.

“I think that television has changed a lot in the last 18 months,” said Robin Sloan, who works in media partnership development at Twitter. “Shows are all in English, but now there is this kind of subtitling going on.”

Mr. Hodgson, whose “Mystery Science Theater” eventually moved to Comedy Central, has a live touring show with the cast of “Mystery Science” called Cinematic Titanic and said that the show then and now was basically a variety show built on a similar notion.

“What is going on now is peculiar, but there are some things in common when I think about it,” he said. “We are all sort of looking at the same thing in the media and saying something at the same time.”

And media companies can’t ignore the new level of collaboration. “I think it is accelerating Darwinism in the media business,” said Bryan Wiener, chief executive of 360i, a digital marketing agency. “If people aren’t talking about you, you are dead. And brands have to attach themselves to things that are permeating the culture and fuel the water cooler.”

Jason Klarman, general manager at the Oxygen Network, credits social media for the ratings ascent of “The bad Girls Club,” which has doubled its audience to two million. Using all manner of interaction on Oxygenlive.com, the network has enabled viewers to talk back to their television and other people watching the same thing. for a small network, that can help level the playing field.

Mr. Klarman says “The bad Girls Club” is knit so tightly into the social media system that on nights it is on, its characters and plot may make up five of the top 10 topics on Twitter.

“Even on nights when the president is speaking or during the first few days of the earthquake in Haiti,” he said.

Jon Klein, CNN’s president, said last week he feels that the network is in competition with Facebook but that there is business in common.

At CNN, the network’s Web site is rife with parallel streams of video and Facebook commentary during major news events. the people formerly known as the audience posted 600,000 status updates while watching streaming video of the inauguration on CNN.com.

“These are all very big experiments that are going to end up paying off in the living room,” said K. C. Estenson, general manager of CNN.com. “Not just in terms of additional audience, but also getting a very clear real time idea of what they are interested in.”

Of course, television has been winking and smirking at itself for more than a decade, with Beavis and Butt-head as they made fun of what was on the tube, but also all of the VH1 show “Pop-up Video.”

Even new shows like “Community” appear to be sit-coms about sit-coms, all the more hilarious for all the winking and homage under way.

But something more powerful, and probably less intimate than having a laugh with your pals, is under way. the act of typing is an intellectual one and creates a distance on the part of the viewer: social media lets us pretend we’re not wallowing in low culture.

“You are not just watching something. you are taking ownership of it by writing about it,” said Michael Hirschorn, a former VH1 executive who now has his own production company. “And television is responding in its own way. A show like ‘The Bachelor’ is clearly produced to generate opinions, pro and con. It’s sort of stupid in a very smart way, purposefully deadpan, made to provoke people.”

That adds up to a lot of people saying they watch “Dancing with the Stars” not because they enjoy it but because they’re really amateur cultural anthropologists. either way, the audience adds up.

“For a long time, it was only the professional critic that was allowed to openly engage in low culture because they were reviewing it, but now that we are all commenting about it, we get a free pass,” said Mr. Sloan from Twitter.

Ten years ago, we laughed at Beavis and Butt-head watching bad heavy-metal videos. But clearly, they were on to something.

E-mail: carr@nytimes.com twitter/carr2n