An Uncommon Commonality

Nashville Predators fans have grown in both size and strength this season; in size most notably due to their success on the ice, advancing beyond the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs for the first time in franchise history. However, I believe it’s the bond forged by social media amongst the fanbase that has strengthened this community of fans like no other. (Photo: Frederick Breedon/Getty Images/AFP)

Freudian Schlep.
Pardon the somewhat heavy-handed subject matter, but this is a leftover topic I’ve wanted to delve into for awhile now, which struck me as particularly poignant last Saturday night, while engaged with other fellow Nashville Predators fans, enjoying Game Two of the Nashville’s’ Western Conference Stanley Cup Semifinal series against Vancouver at the Brewhouse South in Franklin, TN; a game in which the Preds sent the faithful back home away happy with a thrilling 2-1 double-overtime victory.

Long before I began blogging about the Preds — back in the days when four years into being a full-season Predators STH I could still only count the number of other STHs I knew away from the arena on one hand —and well before Twitter and Facebook became the ubiquitous entities they are now, I was aware of the power of social media interaction, via my personal blog, which I began writing in 2004.

While engaging with the new community of other personal bloggers who burst upon the blogging scene in the early part of that year — some who were hardcore like me and some who stuck with it only for a few months or years — I became aware of the marked difference in interpersonal perception between ‘meeting’ and interacting with folks online as opposed to the still-traditional, ‘normal’ face-to-face method.

It wasn’t my first rodeo, online, either. I was an early-adopter of wild-and-wide-open chatroom phenomenon that that spread like wildfire throughout the Interwebs in the mid-to-latter half of the 1990s, suffering more than my share of personal damage in the process. That’s why what I found the more-or-less the evolution of online interaction that personal blogging most certainly was at the dawn of the new millennium, to be such a sea-change from what I’d experienced just a few years prior.

Much to my delight, I was amazed to discover that when left only to the influences of personality and intellect — two things that have less than a 50-50 chance at best of coming to the fore when meeting someone face-to-face, ‘cold’ for the first time, online interaction can be the most fertile of settings in which to establish real, lasting interpersonal relationships.

One of the most astounding statistics I know of in recent years is the well-advertised fact (thank you, Match.com) that currently, more than 50% of all marriages begin as online relationships. Of course, whether or not those marriages will be statistically any more successful than those of a generation ago (which at this point, they don’t appear to be), only time will tell. However the obvious take-away is this: meeting someone online — whether romantically or in casual friendship — is no longer ‘creepy’ or ‘weird’ and that, in my opinion, is a very good thing.

The Happy Hockey Hangover
One of the truly wonderful things about sport of any kind has always been the fellowship of fandom; the enjoyment of a game with a throng of fellow fanatics, joined as one in the bond of belief for their team. The psychological implications are well beyond anything I want to broach here, but suffice it to say, it’s powerful stuff.

This is the obvious attraction of witnessing a game live, but the phenomenon carries over nearly as well to the smaller group setting of watching a game on TeeVee, in a bar packed with fellow home team fans who have expressly eschewed the comfort and privacy of their own homes for the opportunity to scream, holler, and make a spectacle of themselves in public.

Certainly, previous to recent years, these kinds of situations existed, but more or less so in the realm of pre-established relationships with a person or persons, or with an establishment in which ‘everybody knows your name.’ But what if you’re not a sports barfly, necessarily? Chances are you cheered your team’s exploits from home, in front of your own TeeVee, perhaps with a friend or two to keep you company.

And while not all team’s fanbase have adopted social media on a level like Nashville’s, the difference it has made in this community is pretty remarkable. People are drawn together with the commonality of devotion to a hockey team, but often go well beyond that, forging friendships, supporting each other in time of catastrophic need (e.g. last year’s devastating May floods), and fashioning real bonds that last well after the season comes to an end.

Thanks to tools like Facebook and Twitter, the phenomenon seems even more powerful now when folks come together in person, tapping into yet another level of connection and camaraderie, based not only on a common devotion to their team, but on the personal familiarity and true friendship established by the life-links they’ve forged online.

Can you see the REAL me, can ya?
I have always believed that even casual online friendships, when later augmented by personal contact can exist on an entirely different level than those established solely in the traditional person-to-person-only reality we’ve always been accustomed to.

And especially with regard to the common practice back in the chatroom days of deception, even predatory behavior being prevalent online, despite the fact that avatars can be deceiving, the freedom of bearing one’s behind, so to speak, and revealing the true you in a non-human contact setting (prior to doing so in public) is often a much less daunting transition than in an exclusive face-to-face scenario, where oftentimes, societal prejudice can preclude fair judgment.  As social media becomes more and more an ingrained part of societal  culture, while it remains just as easy to promote deception as it is genuineness while ‘lurking’ behind a keyboard, in settings of genuine commonality, like those shared among sports fans, that kind of scenario seems to becoming less and less prevalent.

People everywhere are now generally accepting of the near-necessity of social media interaction, as a part of interpersonal relationships, and in my opinion, that’s a good thing. Taking such a step in which traditional social apprehension is generally rendered moot in favor of communicating more of one’s true essence is only one of the many positive realities that social media has injected into modern society.

Okay, I’m done philosophizing for the moment; you can get up off the psychologist’s couch…

Meet ya back for tonight’s group session at Bridgestone Arena; Game Three, Predators vs. Canucks, where 17,113 of my closest friends will be raising the roof.

 

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finis