Not everyone is online

Trolling, streaming, and other notes from the NFL Wildcard Weekend

This past Saturday, I called my dad to check on him. 

The winter storm that blasted the Buffalo area was just starting, so we talked about the weather. He’s north of the city, so he wasn’t getting too much. Nothing like the couple feet that Orchard Park got. 

My dad’s 83, a widow, and very much offline. During the pandemic, my sister and I got him the most basic Chromebook so he could watch Mass streaming online and maybe email us if he wanted to. But for the most part, he is not part of the internet world. Never has been.

It was a little before 5 p.m., and we were talking about the weather, about how his snowblower and furnace were working and he had enough food and would keep an eye on the forecast before deciding whether or not to go to church Sunday morning. 

Well, he said, it looks like the Bills are going to play through it tomorrow. 

I paused for just a second.

No dad, the game was postponed until Monday. The governor announced it earlier. 

He hadn’t heard. 

Of course he hadn’t. There hadn’t been a newscast scheduled between the noonish announcement and when we had talked. There was obviously no newspaper printed and delivered in those few hours. 

How would he have known?

Meanwhile, I had been through like five iterations of the story by that point — the announcement, the back-and-forth online, the why-didn’t-they-build-a-dome?, the should-we-get-tickets?, the what it meant for the team and their playoff hopes. 

And honestly? In that moment I was a little jealous of my dad. Imagine not knowing the news the second it happens? Imagine not being swept up in a story the moment the news breaks, and feeling like you have to have multiple opinions and takes on a story?

I know this is not the way of the world, and I don’t think it should be. 

But in that moment, it felt like such a delightfully old school way of interacting with the world. 

Trolling as a news value

Speaking of the Bills-Steelers game, there was a media member from Pittsburgh who traveled to Buffalo for the game and spent the weekend mocking the city and Bills fans as soft. 

I’m not naming them or linking to their posts. They work for the company named after the piece of furniture Norm Peterson sat on, and my feelings on that misogynistic hellhole aren’t a secret. 

But one thing jumped out at me. At some point, he posted something along the lines of “what’s the point of being in the playoffs if you’re not trolling the other team’s fans and making people mad online?”

It struck me as an example of how trolling has become a kind of news value. Trolling is the point. Making people mad online is the point. Getting a reaction is the point. 

Nothing new, right? 

But it got me thinking about the nature of interacting with people online, and the problem of bad-faith actors. See, as people responded to the dude and told him how lake-effect snow works and how it’s kind of important for first-responders and plows to be available during a storm and not digging out a football stadium, he kept trolling. Because that was the point, right? Getting a reaction, making people mad. That was the news value.

Now, think about how that affects how we collectively react when we see any question online? When we, for example, see JJ Watt’s Tweet about moving the game. 

Is our instinct to say “hey, this is an honest question being asked in good faith by someone genuinely curious about the issue? Let me offer my perspective.” Or is our instinct now to think “Hey, stop trolling us you stupid jerk! BOOOOOOOOO!”

Streaming game

My friend Steve Gattine messaged me early last week, wondering if I was going to write anything about the fact that an NFL playoff game this past weekend was only available on streaming. 

A few notes on that: 

• I’m surprised this wasn’t a larger issue than it was. It probably speaks to the centrality of streaming in our media landscape that it was just kind of accepted. 

• That said, given the stuff I wrote about my dad at the top of this newsletter, it is really weird that the NFL took a whole playoff game away from a large portion of its audience. 

• A friend of mine asked if I thought the Super Bowl would wind up on streaming only some day. No chance. There is too much advertising money at stake. Plus, moving one wild card playoff game to streaming is very different than America’s secular holiday.

• When I was growing up, boxing and wrestling events began moving to Pay Per View, and I have vague memories of discussions about whether other sports would move to a PPV model. I wonder if the reaction to all of this would have been different if this had been framed as “The NFL has put a playoff game on Pay Per View,” which it essentially did, rather than “The NFL has partnered with a streaming service.” The outrage would have been a lot louder.

• At the end of the day, I think this feels icky because it feels so over-the-top greedy. The NFL is doing just fine. Yes, this is a business. Yes, this was probably logical from an economic mindset (live sports on a streaming service helps solve what my pal Andy Billings calls the HBO Test — does a pay service have one thing you need?). But it just felt like it’s too greedy, too much.