In this day and age, social media has an effect on everything. One of the biggest things it has an effect on is sports. Every play that happens is posted on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, just pretty much everywhere. If you don't know what the score is, that's okay. Just hop on Twitter and find out! The question I ask is, what kind of effect does it really have? Good or bad? A mix of both? I'm not really sure myself, but let's break it down a little bit and see what we come up with!
First, let's start with the pros. What kind of things make social media good when it comes to sports? Well, the easiest one is the one I already stated in the first paragraph. If you aren't home to watch the game, just log onto pretty much any social media site, run a quick search, and you can find out what the score is. Pretty convenient!
Another good thing is the sort of "behind the scenes" sneak peek you can get into the sports world. Now that so many professional sports players have Twitter, Instagram, etc. it's easy to get a unique look into what goes on. You can also talk with other fans and meet some pretty good people that have the same interests as you do.
Now, let's look at the cons of social media and sports. Sadly, I can think of a lot of them, much easier than I would the good things. First off, I think that social media can truly effect a team's morale. With all of the things being posted all over, we have to think that the team and it's players see all of the bad things said. This also means they can see the good things, but when people are talking about how bad they are playing, etc. it can really hurt a team's morale.
Another negative is players making themselves look bad. Let's be honest, a lot of things said on social media can easily be taken the wrong way. If a player makes one little comment that someone doesn't like, it can easily be spread all over the internet, making them look bad whether they meant anything bad by it or not.
The last negative I'm going to list kind of ties in with one of the positives. Sure, I've met many people that like the same team that I do and have become good friends with them over sports. The bond one can have when rooting for the same team is a bond like no other.. but it also makes for a lot of conflict if someone likes a different team. I've also come across a lot of smack talk, rude comments, and mean things said back and forth when people don't agree on what team they root for.
I'll admit, I myself have gotten caught up in some of that kind of talk. I don't go around looking for fights, of course, although I've found that people chime in a lot about what team I root for and what things I post if they don't like it or disagree with me. It's like that for all sports, though. People constantly argue over their teams on social media. This is something, sadly, that will stick around for as long as social media and sports does.
In conclusion, I think that there are more bad than good connections when it comes to social media and sports. This is just my opinion, the good things keep me around so it's all a matter of perspective. I guess it depends on the day, as the world of social media is constantly changing.
