Last night, despite not being a professional basketball fan by any stretch of the imagination, I found myself sitting down to watch the spectacle that was the ESPN special “The Decision.” For anyone living under a rock, ESPN broadcast an hourlong program about LeBron James’ decision on where to continue his basketball career. Because my husband was controlling the remote, I can blame my watching the show on him. What I can’t blame on him, however, was my incessant need to immediately run to the blogosphere, Twitterville and Facebook to see what my friends and collective communities were saying about LeBron’s decision. I even updated my own status to reflect my fair-weather opinion.
Even though I had watched LeBron play only once in my entire lifetime, I immediately cared about what everyone else I cared about thought of this seemingly monumental freeze-frame in basketball history. Would I have had the same level of interest 10 years ago, in the days before social media (for me, anyway)? It seemed I only really cared because I wanted to participate in the conversation about the decision—specifically, the online conversation about the decision.
Interestingly, while constantly refreshing my BlackBerry for updates, I noticed several status updates from a friend, who was apparently on vacation at a lake house for the week. The first update detailed how glad she was to be away from TV for the week and not a part of the media frenzy surrounding LeBron. The next status update (about 15 minutes later) detailed how much she was enjoying watching her 3-year-old son play on their balcony…instead of watching LeBron. The next status update (another 15 minutes later) was a mobile upload of a picture of the sun setting over the lake, which she captioned “What I’ve been watching while you were all watching LeBron.” The irony didn’t escape me: It seemed she was spending more time trying to convince the world that she was unplugged and therefore not paying attention to the LeBron show, but in reality she was updating as frequently as the rest of us—all the while, mentioning LeBron.
It leads me to wonder: Do we really care about the things we think we care about? Or do we just want to prove to people in our online communities that we’re paying attention (or not paying attention)?
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