Athlete tweeters frivolous, condescending

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 10/08/2010 (5849 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

To tweet or not to tweet, that is the question a lot of professional athletes, including CFLers, seem to be asking themselves these days. But when it comes to interacting with fans of your profession or sport, and publicizing your every thought and move, how much is too much and where should the line be drawn?

It is simply amazing how much athlete accessibility and the self promotional tools available to us have changed since I began playing professional football in 1997. Back in that day, teams were on the cusp of putting websites together on the Internet to advertise their franchises and players would make their own T-shirts if they thought they were a big deal. Radio and television programs discussed and talked about the players and the game, and the latest sporting controversy would be debated in earnest at the office water cooler.

Today, the options for both players and fans alike have changed the way sports news is disseminated. Athletes blog, write for all sorts of publications, have Myspace and Facebook accounts, hold online question and answer sessions, build their own interactive websites, host radio and sports talk television shows, and now tweet on the newest social medium called Twitter.

Fans of the game can seemingly do just as much, posting their comments and thoughts across every spectrum of media possible, and can get lost and assume aliases and fictional identities through all the anonymity that the Internet offers.

But just this past week, watching Rob Murphy from the Toronto Argonauts, Nik Lewis from the Calgary Stampeders, and Korey Banks from the B.C. Lions, tweet themselves onto the fronts of sport sections across the nation and one of them into the disciplinary office of the CFL, makes you wonder whether being able to express yourself at a whim and in a multitude of formats is necessarily a good thing.

My first question when it comes to increasing access to players in their respective sports, is where does it all eventually stop? Judging from how things have changed in the 14 years I have been playing, 10 years from now will players be wearing sunglasses that transmit what they are seeing, and will fans be able to log onto servers that give them complete audio and visual imaging of their favorite athlete, as long as he or she has turned on their "interactive ware?"

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I, of course, am one of those players who is quite accessible. I have a Facebook page with thousands of "friends" (of whom I only know a few hundred) who are free to view pictures I have posted and those posted by others, along with any "status updates" I may make, and can write on my site. People can comment on any column I have written as soon as it is posted on Winnipegfreepress.com, and for the brave souls, they can call into the radio show I host and interact with me live. All three of my vocations are driven by audience interest and receptiveness — without any readers or listeners or fans attending your games you are out of work — so it makes sense to me to open these forums to those who pay your salary. But is continually allowing another and another layer of yourself be peeled back to people that are interested in you necessary to stay relevant and on top of the latest social shortcut that opens the window a little further into your psyche? Is there any amount of information that is too much or level of privacy that should not be eventually accessed? If you do not have hundreds of people subscribing to your twitter account are you falling behind in the game of full disclosure that we seem to be playing?

For me, right now, "Twitter" is something that is too fringe and not purposeful enough to indulge in. Whereas on Facebook, sharing parts of your life is reciprocal between you and the people that add you and the content is much more static in nature, tweeting multiple times a day, to me, reeks of frivolity and borderline condescension. "These are my random thoughts and musings as I go about my daily business, feel free to fall all over yourself interpreting and commenting on my non-linear, knee -jerk reactions to mundane things I encounter as I live my life."

The wide world of sports has become an on-demand business where its patrons can now expect real-time scores and highlights. Do they really want to know how we feel about the scent of a person we are travelling with and how we are spending the minutes of our day? At what point does the pointless information we dispense, without purpose or end, simply become on-demand spam?

Doug Brown, always a hard-hitting defensive lineman and frequently a hard-hitting columnist, appears Tuesdays in the Free Press. And don’t look for him on Twitter.