Twitter Heals All Wounds?

This man deserves more than your 140-characters

I hope you had an amazing holiday weekend.  If it was amazing enough, you haven’t even heard the terrible thing that happened in the sports world, former NFL QB Steve McNair was found shot to death in Nashville.  If your weekend wasn’t quite good enough to put yourself outside the span of this news, either by location or by alcoholic intake, you, like me, have been trying to make sense of this senseless slaying for more than 24 hours.  As the authorities continue to investigate and details continue to trickle in, who should we turn to for guidance?  Who can make sense of such a horrible event?  This being 2009, your best bet is to find the most unlikely place, filled with idiocy and failure, and look to it.  Twitterverse anyone? 

As of Saturday evening, nearly four-percent of all tweets mentioned Steve McNair.  To figure out if that is an impressive number or not, let’s do the math.  It is estimated that on average there are about 50-thousand people on Twitter every hour making an average of about 83-thousand tweets.  If four-percent of the tweets from one hour were about the same topic, there would be more than 3300.  Damn, all this research into how many people are on Twitter makes me want to start an account, which makes me feel so dirty.  But then, I realize of their millions of users, I only want to meet a couple dozen or so, and of them, I’m only interested in what a handful of them have to say.  So screw you, Twitter.  Our bitter feud continues. 

Not only were the unwashed masses on Twitter making absolutely no difference what so ever in tweeting their condolences and thoughts on Steve McNair’s death, but also the celebrities of the sports world chimed in with their thoughts.  Why?  Because SportsCenter had to fill 3 minutes.  Terrell Owens, Takeo Spikes and Steve Smith all had their tweets quoted on ESPN Saturday night, almost like it was acceptable journalism.  How many interns and PAs do you think were put on the task of gathering notable people’s tweets about Steve McNair?  No less than three, I’ll estimate.  Meanwhile, ONE actual reporter was in Nashville digging up details on the investigation.  To me, that’s the same as if NASA had sent only one astronaut to the moon in Apollo 11 while the rest of the men stayed on Earth and played Asteroids.  Only then, they would have had to let the men playing Asteroids report on their findings at the same press conference as the one actual astronaut.  And they would have given them both equal time. 

Maybe I’m alone in my crusade against Twitter being used as a news-gathering device, but I hope we can all agree that it isn’t the forum to express your condolences to a family that has just lost a member.  If you were to rank all the ways you could express grief to the surviving members of a family on a scale of acceptableness, it would start with face-to-face, over the phone, through a letter, through an email, on a voicemail and on and on.  Eventually, you’d get down to through a singing telegram, through a text message, through your Facebook status message, through a punch in the face and finally, through Twitter.  If you disagree with me, that’s both acceptable and expected.  But the next time someone you know passes away, be cognisant of how long it takes you to think, ‘I hope someone left a message about this horrible time on Twitter.’

Tags: football, NFL, Steve McNair

3 Comments to Twitter Heals All Wounds?

Saint Joe
July 6, 2009

“I hope you had an amazing holiday weekend.”

Wait… Hold on a second. The weekend is over?

JimmaJam
July 6, 2009

“If you were to rank all the ways you could express grief to the surviving members of a family on a scale of acceptableness, it would start with face-to-face, over the phone, through a letter, through an email, on a voicemail and on and on.”

I usually just fax a picture of my junk pressed in the copy machine with “I’m sorry” written on it.

Steve McNair's Ghost
July 6, 2009

Yes, I prefer condolences expressed in sports satire blogs to tweets.

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