Technology has been praised for shrinking the world. We can live video chat with someone thousands of miles away on a cell phone now. The 24-hours news cycle has allowed even the most local of stories to become national or even worldwide news. Youtube, Twitter, and their ilk have given everyone a shot at their 15 minutes. A lot of good has come out of this. But it can hardly be surprising that a lot of dumb has come out of it.
And I don’t mean “bad.” I mean “dumb.” Twitter has done for live sports exactly what it has done for the rest of life. It has allowed anyone to share his or her most mundane, profound, and downright ridiculous insights into just about anything, including sports, with the online world. With a 140-character, limit there isn’t much room for careful, complex writing and with one-click publishing, the time it takes a thought to get from brain synapse to World Wide Wed is next to nothing. What everyone needs to remember is that technology didn’t create the Cutler backlash. It merely allowed the public’s opinion to become just that -- public.
This weekend was the first time I watched a live sporting event set, from the get-go, on following the game online as well as on TV. I settled in with my iPhone at the ready. I checked Twitter and Quickish every time there was a good play, a sloppy call, or a booger. What I was struck by was how all I was reading were things I had already heard, sometimes only seconds earlier, from my friends with whom I was watching the games. Sure, some posts may have been a littler wittier or more succinct than what we were saying. But sometimes, we were all just thinking the same thing. In fact, my buddy from Chicago took off his Cutler jersey in disgust and threatened to burn it right there in the family room. Not 10 minutes later, I was able to show him a picture of some guy in Chicago who had actually followed through on that very same threat.
This is the beauty of new media. Suddenly, I’m not just watching these games with a half dozen friends in the living room of some apartment in California. Now I’m watching it with the whole country. I’m watching with ESPN analysts. With the beat reporters from each of the teams’ hometowns. With Hall of Famers and current players who didn’t make it to January. How could that be a bad thing? I found humor and comfort in what others were saying online. I felt relieved to know that my analysis of the game was not far off from the top analysts and reporters were saying and that my jokes were not much less funny than those from the most quick-witted sports personalities.
Everyone I was watching with was ripping on Cutler. Why didn't we see him icing his knee or limping down the sideline? Why didn’t we see him talking with some trainers? Or at the very least, why, once all hope was lost, did he not don a headset to help out his backups? All the big names online did was to voice these same concerns coming from many family rooms across America. What is the benefit (or the fun) of minute-by-minute updates if they are not going to be a bit brash and hasty? Instead of listening to talking heads preaching patience and maturity hours after the clock has run out, it was fun to see everyone reacting in real time. Suddenly, we were all just fans. Regardless of our qualifications, for a while, we were all just fans, watching a game and wondering what was going on on the sideline.
This is the very phenomenon I will explore on this blog. Technology and new media have created a whole new world of sports. Fans, players, and experts are interacting in ways never seen before while navigating uncharted waters. The way we experience sport has fundamentally changed. And now I’m here to figure it all out.
