Game Changer

1/16/16:

Lately sports are becoming more and more popular on social media.  The sport fans of the world have embraced twitter as a way to connect with their fellow fans and freely say their opinion where people might actually see it versus yelling to the ref on the screen where everyone knows they really can’t hear you.  This is why I believe social media and sports are becoming more closely connected.   People feel more engaged in the conversation of that horrible call or epic shot.  They can express how they feel about all this with another world of people who also saw the same thing.  It is amazing how it can connect us as a nation.  When the U.S. women’s national team won the world cup twitter went crazy.  In that moment much of the nation was united.

Without social media sports play a huge part in our nation’s values.  Our love of sports is so deep that our values start to reflect those that are presented in sports. America is a competitive society.  We value winning a lot, probably too much.  This may be a reflection of the heavy influence sorts have on our lives.  That being said, the people who lead these sports or are the faces of them have great power in their hands.  They have the power to uplift and improve our society as a whole.  That is a pretty great power. 

The company KT Tape collected data on how much things like twitter and Facebook are used in association with sports.  They found that 83% of sports fans will check social media sites while watching the game on TV.  Also that 63% of sports fans will browse social media sites while they are at the game!  This was quite surprising to me.  I could see checking social media for updates because you can’t watch the game but when you are watching it I don’t see the need to do so.

With this rage of media and sports athletes are gaining more attention to their lives than ever before.  This means these athletes have even more influence over our society than before.  As said above, the main faces of these massively watched sports have great responsibility on their hands.  They have the ability to inspire us and drive us.  

I’m not really sure if us tuning in to social media to tweet about the game is a good thing or bad thing.  It does united people and it lets my dad call out the refs on Facebook versus him yelling at a screen which is nice for me.  I do believe you shouldn’t be talking about the game on social media if you are actually at the game.  I mean you should put down the screen in front of your face so you can see the game being played in front of you.  I am very interested to see where the world of sports and social media go next.  It was very interesting to see just exactly how much we connect sports with social media.  There is an endless amount of possibilities this could go.  We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.