A week ago now, in the wake of the last round of ESPN layoffs, Jon Finkel wrote an interesting tweet. Excerpts:
Dads and 90s kids, here’s a fact:
We had it so good with SportsCenter and we didn’t know it…. How could we?
During that brief, bright spot in sports media in the 1990s, SportsCenter was the only way to get the day’s highlights…
We had black and white photos and box scores and features in the newspaper…
We had brilliant writing and reporting and pictures in Sports Illustrated and Sporting News and ESPN: The Magazine…
But for the day’s highlights…
To watch Ken Griffey Jr. make a diving catch or Jordan hit a game winner or Barry Sanders twirl through a defensive line…
If you didn’t catch it live, the only way to see it was on SportsCenter (maybe your local news sports show – maybe)…
And into this void stepped Dan Patrick and Keith Olbermann and Stuart Scott and Rich Eisen and Craig Kilborn and Linda Cohn and Robin Roberts and crew…
And all the catch phrases every kid in high school and college would repeat: “cool as the other side of the pillow”… Jumanji… En Fuego….
We’d watch SportsCenter at night then again in the morning.
It was a monolith. You’d show up at school and you’d have the same frame of reference for the highlights you saw. It was a shared experience.
“It was a shared experience.”
I’m not of the opinion that the world is getting worse. There is too much data to contradict that. The 1990s were uniquely peaceful and prosperous, I’ll grant this, but cancer treatment was a lot worse than it is today, and violent crime was far more prevalent. I am, though, susceptible to nostalgia, and I too find myself looking rosily-eyed back at the turn of the millennium, when I first came into sports consciousness and SportsCenter and Baseball Tonight formed my first media diet.
ESPN was, as Finkel writes, the dominant force in sports media back then. It’s lost that title since, and though ESPN made a few mistakes along the way, it’s a development largely independent of ESPN’s own actions. ESPN lost its grasp on sports media because sports media became too big, not only in supply but in demand.
We’re going to use a water metaphor here.
We used to visit a few wells to get our media consumption: Television. Radio. Newspapers. Magazines. These wells, especially television and newspapers, were costly to construct, and so media suppliers catered towards masses, and media consumers all drank many of the same things. Even with cable, we mostly all got about fifty channels, and we mostly only watched our own specific dozen of them, a dozen which we shared with many of our cultural peers. Then, the internet came along, and society figured out how to do media on it, and we had a new source of water. It still took some effort to visit—think of how quick it is to check your computer versus how quickly you can check your smartphone—even more effort than turning on the television, but it was easy for the supply side to fragment and tailor to our individual preferences. The cost to enter was lower than for television, newspaper, or magazine, and the geographic reach was wider than that of radio. For comparable effort, then, to visiting one of the wells, you could go to a water station with all sorts of different bottles, choosing yours a la carte. More specific flavors were commercially viable in a new way.
Where the situation really changed was the smartphone, which not only turbocharged social media but brings the water straight to our metaphorical houses in highly specific, easily changed forms, not only putting millions of straws inches from our mouths but actively guiding us towards ones we might want to drink from. Right as television and radio and newspapers and magazines were using streaming and online publication to pivot to their own bottle approach, more specific than the old wells, the internet—via the smartphone—was starting to shove straws in our mouths, and we could not and cannot get enough. The result? We’re no longer drinking the same water, often not even as our cultural peers. My media diet is highly different from those of my brothers and those of my best friends, and my brothers and my best friends and I share a wide set of interests.
What we miss, then, is what Finkel touched on: The shared experience. Just as many past a certain age pine for the days of Kronkite, many in my generation now pine for Stuart Scott. It’s not that simple—it never was, it never is, our brains heavily sandpaper the past at moments when the present feels unstable—but it was, to be fair, simpler. And I do wonder, among the list of things that really have gotten worse, whether the absence of these shared experiences in media consumption contributes to how incongruent so many of our thoughts are with those of people around us. In so many cases, we’re not only working with different sets of facts, but we’re looking at an entirely different set of happenings, catered technologically to thrill or amuse or infuriate us to the maximum degree possible. In the old shared experiences, at least we were looking at the picture through the same frame.
Is this a mortal threat for our country? I doubt it for many reasons, not least of which is the potency of inertia. But that said: Shared experiences can go a long way in a country this large.
