Hatred and poor behavior festers on social media
None of Shakespeare’s incredible soliloquies fit in a tweet. Very little of what I’ve written in my career fits in a tweet, either. But “Luke … I am your father” makes it in with characters to spare.
I admit it, I have a bias toward an information system that obeys the rules of grammar. I’m showing my age, but I prefer to read something that doesn’t need a cypher. Given the choice between B4N (Twitter for ‘Bye for now’) and “Good night, good night! Parting is such sweet sorrow, that I shall say good night till it be morrow,” I’m taking The Bard every time.
As a sports writer, Twitter has become a useful tool in tracking the news of the day. It serves a clue that sends you off in search of the meatier version of what happens. But you can’t confuse the literary quality of the two.
For example:
The tweet: “Notre Dame 13, Army 7 @pologrounds #upset.”
The New York Herald story: “Outlined against a blue-gray October sky, the Four Horsemen rode again. In dramatic lore they are known as Famine, Pestilence, Destruction and Death. These are only aliases. Their real names are Stuhldreher, Miller, Crowley and Layden. They formed the crest of the South Bend cyclone before which another fighting Army football team was swept over the precipice at the Polo Grounds yesterday afternoon as 55,000 spectators peered down on the bewildering panorama spread on the green plain below.”
Not every story gets the full Grantland Rice treatment the way this one from Oct. 18, 1924, did, but you get my drift.
But you balance that insane brevity with the expansive impact Twitter and other social media has had around the world, especially from inside places where individual voices are rarely heard. It’s powerful. And the in case of the Arab Spring, it is literally revolutionary.
To push the cliché a bit, that would be the force.
The dark side was prominently on display over the weekend.
By now you’ve seen the video – on the news or online – of Michigan giving away a win over Michigan State on a botched punt with 10 seconds left. The sight of a punter from Australia mishandling a bad snap and directing the ball to a Spartan racing toward the end zone was everywhere.
I’m pretty sure I heard the cries of joy and anguish simultaneously from about three different directions.
And then Twitter stepped in, and among the countless tweets were death threats against the player.
You hear some pretty nasty stuff hanging around stadiums and coliseums for more than three decades, but death threats are something new (so long as you don’t count “Kill the ump!”).
There’s always been nasty stuff happening out there. Remember Colombian soccer player Andres Escobar? He unfortunately scored an own goal for the United States in the 1994 World Cup tournament – a goal that led to Colombia being eliminated. He was murdered on his return to Bogota.
I can still hear some of the things Red Sox fans said about Billy Buckner after a ball rolled between his legs in the 1986 World Series. It was so bad that when I heard the warm welcome Buckner received when he returned for the 100th anniversary of Fenway Park, it brought tears to my eyes.
What you read on social media is nastier and meaner than just about anything I have ever heard at a game because people just don’t say these kinds of things in public. We censure the knee-jerk id that wants to spout the ugliness that pops up in the heat of the moment and for most of us, that ugliness goes away before we even think of picking up a smartphone or running to a keyboard.
But there are always a few who will use the anonymity of social media to let that ugliness out.
It’s an unforgivable act anytime, but it’s especially heinous when such abuse is heaped on amateur athletes – especially high school kids and, yes, younger.
And yes, that happens.
In another context we refer to such things as “cyber bullying.” Why it isn’t called that when it comes to athletes is as offensive as it is puzzling.
No one deserves abuse for putting themselves out there to play a game, and those who indulge in heaping it out should both be ashamed of themselves, and in most cases publicly shamed, for doing it.
Email correspondent Steve Christilaw at steve.christilaw@gmail.com.