Occasionally, Paul -- affectionately known as "Doc" -- will allow a faithful reader to fill in and write the blog. It's a pretty cool opportunity allowed by Doc -- who by no means has to -- for an average Joe to share his thoughts on things usually discussed in the blog. It's Cincinnati fans following Cincinnati stuff. In my case, mostly Reds. You can catch it here, if you want to check it out.
So Doc allowed me to fill the space last week, and I penned a fairly benign piece that introduced a little about me, my thoughts on the current state of the Reds, a little bit about team fandom, and a couple side notes. Nothing major or Earth-shattering. I did have the gall to predict that I believed the Reds would win the National League Central division next season.
And that's where it got interesting. To be fair, the piece itself didn't set off any firestorms and generate thousands of comments. It got shared a couple times and about 20 others commented. Of those, about half were agreeable, and the other half not so much.
One commenter wrote, "ya know, you make a decent point, but I don't agree with it. I just don't think the Reds will have the firepower to win the division next year."
NOT!!!
Instead, here's a couple of the comments:
"Stay off the weed!!!!!!!!" (Exactly eight exclamation points. I counted.)
"Just what exactly are you smoking." (No commas, with a period at the end instead of a question mark.)
A couple others just posted, "lol" Presumably because I'd said something funny. A few others slapped down the crying-tears, riotously-laughing emoji, some even plopping down multiple emojis, as if one wasn't enough to get the point across.
One clearly sunny guy called the Reds "f****** garbage" and wrote there "ain't going to be no f****** winning" (No period on the sentence, and he used the asterisks so as to avoid having to actually write f******.)
He mostly concluded his comments with, "All i see is 💩💩💩💩💩💩 besides geno and Aquino Iglesias I'd keep" (Again, verbatim, spelling intact and no period.)
This guy, who believes the Reds are nothing but copulating trash, and field a lineup of nothing but poo and two other players, follows Doc's Reds coverage so much to actually read a piece by his guest blogger. Mind boggling.
Others attacked the players, calling them "bums" and "washed up trash."
No daggers to the heart, of course, and, again, some were encouraging and agreeable. But now, imagine what guys like Doc have to put up with every day!
Now, multiply and intensify that by about, I don't know, 100 million, and imagine what President Trump has to put up with every day of his life!
This past Sunday, a safety for the Cleveland Browns played particularly poorly in their loss to the Denver Broncos. The vitriol he received was so vile it caused him to lash back out with the same hatred and ultimately cost him his job. Was released by his team just for his posts on social media. I'm not condoning his actions at all. I'm just making a point.
I wrote a guest blog about a baseball team and got accused of being a drug addict. Guys like Doc take heat every day they don't deserve, and a man like President Trump has to deal with lunatics spewing some stuff I can't possibly even imagine. And we wonder why he gets a little testy sometimes.
They go to work, every day, and do their job, in the face of the hatred they get on a regular basis. Amazing.
But here's the thing: Social media didn't create these nutballs. Oh no, they've been around forever. Social media just gave them a platform.
Several years ago, a gentleman I'd never met tapped me on the shoulder one day and basically told me that a show I'd emceed back in the 1990's when he was a teenager had impacted his life so much that he was inspired into his chosen career. Seems I'd made that day so much fun for him that he wanted to make teaching his life work so he could help other kids attend those types of events. It was odd and humbling and flattering. I'd never been gushed over like that. I thanked him and congratulated him on his successes.
All that was before he found out I was a political conservative.
And he might never have known that about me if he hadn't followed me on my social media account and found that everything I valued and championed in life was a full-on affront to everything he has come to believe in his adult life. Now, understand, I'm no different today in my beliefs than I was in the mid 90's. I was a conservative then, and I still am now. But this young man didn't know that, because we never talked about it. He knew nothing of my belief system until I posted it on social media.
He's not such a big fan of me now. Not because I changed, but because he found out something about me he might not have otherwise known. I'm still the same old fun emcee he knew back then. It's just that now he knows I voted for Donald Trump, and he doesn't like that very much. And so now he doesn't like me very much.
All because of social media.
Social media isn't bad in and of itself. In fact, the reality is that there is a lot of good in it, and much usefulness to it. Keeping in touch with a long-distance friend has a lot of value.
But it has indeed brought out the worst in people. Literally. Because it gave them all a voice, a platform. The worms were always there, you just didn't see them lurking underground until the storm hit and they all came out into the light.
People who hate didn't start hating because they got a Facebook account. They've always hated. They just didn't have the avenue, or the wherewithal, or the guts, to go public with it. They still don't, but the difference is that social media allows them to spew their idiocy out to the whole world and yet still hide behind the keyboard in their basement in relative anonymity.
I put my name on everything. EVERYTHING. I do not intend to hurt people's feelings, or insult them, or offend them. But I'm also very confident in my opinions and I don't much care whether people agree with them or not. That being said, rarely do I confront anyone on social media who I have not A) already had an in-person conversation with, B) intend to, or am willing to, have an in-person conversation with them, or C) already have a close enough relationship to know we can have an open and honest debate, even if it's on the interweb for all to see.
I've never called in to a phone-in radio program. I've never written a letter-to-the-editor without putting my name on it, and I've never trolled someone on social media for the sole purpose of attacking them over something I didn't like. Anybody I've debated on social media has been done in an open back and forth. I've never used vulgarity or called them vile names, and I've certainly never disdained someone's opinions without having an open discussion with them where we both had an opportunity to back up our positions.
None of which is to say I'm perfect, or haven't burned a couple bridges along the way. Rather, it's just to point out that the craziness and the ugliness we see on a daily basis has always been there, we just couldn't see it. Social media gave it a face.
The bigger problem, of course, is the reliance we all put on it. I don't mind a healthy debate, but otherwise could really care less if someone agrees with something I post or not. But the traditional media outlets have begun to use social media as a crutch. And they've become very lazy. The days of actual reporting for any news outlet are virtually non-existent anymore. Almost every news story one sees or reads these days is a two or three-sentence blurb about the subject, followed by a smattering of what various social media users think of the story. Even worse, in print, rather than actually write a story, most reporters just copy and paste social media reactions, as though they're actually relevant to the story. And then, to add insult to injury, after they've copied and pasted the post, they actually show a screenshot of the post itself, so the lunacy appears twice in the story.
Someone getting shot in the street is a news story. Broadcasting what Joe Schmuck posted from his Mom's basement about the shooting is not.
Look, I get it: I'm part of the problem. I'm writing a blog at this very moment hoping you'll read it, because I believe my opinion on the matter has some relevance, as though it actually does. Whether it does or not is left up to you, the reader. But at the same time, I don't expect NBC News to pick up my blog and simply repost it as a news story. But that is exactly what they do day in and day out with thousands of social media posts.
And so it makes stories that really aren't stories at all seem a whole lot bigger than they are. Pamela Anderson wore an Indian headdress (and very little else, it turns out) as part of her Halloween costume. Did you know that? You shouldn't, because it's not a news story. But there it was, in my news feed. And sure enough, there was a couple lines about the costume, the obligatory photos wherein Ms. Anderson was half-naked wearing a headdress, and then four or five Twitter posts shaming her for "culture-appropriation" of Native Americans, whatever that means, and four or five Twitter posts applauding how great she looked in her costume, given that she's 60 or 70 years old by now.
It's lunacy. Not because it was so stupid to begin with, but rather because the story makes you believe the entire social media world was in an upheaval over her Halloween costume. And while there may have been dozens, maybe hundreds, maybe even thousands of people who have nothing better to do than follow Pamela Anderson's social media accounts, this was not a viable news story in any way, despite what four or five (or, perhaps, a hundred) haters thought about it.
Did you know that Barack Obama leads the world in Twitter followers? He does. Just over 110 million followers, nearly a third the country's total population. And yet he complains about Donald Trump's tweets. (Katy Perry and Justin Bieber are #'s 2 and 3, so that should tell you something about Twitter.) Notwithstanding that Twitter itself is the absolute spawn of Satan, I don't troll the platform all day and pounce on every single Tweet I don't agree with. I simply don't have Twitter. And even if I did, I still wouldn't do it.
ANALOGY ALERT... I learned something a long time ago: Children are intensifiers for a marriage. If you have a good marriage, adding children to the family will make it better. But if you have a bad marriage, and relationship problems, children will make it infinitely worse.
Social Media is the same. It is an intensifier. If you're a relatively good and happy person, your social media accounts will amplify that. If you're a putz to begin with, then your social media will make you look like a bigger putz.
So do what you want. Be a follower, a troll, a Tweeter, an influencer, whatever. Just know that we know you were whatever long before you got a social media account. Social media didn't make you a good guy or a putz. You did that long ago.
Looking forward to the comments.
Good read bro. Proud of you!
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