Just a quick post this Saturday about Twitter partnering with NASCAR to cover the Pocono 400. Via Mashable:
The Pocono 400 partnership will revolve around the #NASCAR hashtag, according to a joint press conference Twitter and NASCAR held Friday.
“During the race, we’ll curate accounts from the NASCAR universe and surface the best Tweets and photos from the drivers, their families, commentators, celebrities and other fans when you search #NASCAR on Twitter.com,” reads a post to the official company blog.
Full disclosure: I know next-to-nothing about NASCAR. The most idiosyncratic thing I know about NASCAR is that the headlights are painted on, and not real. Other than that, someone could tell me that you get extra points (less points?) if the car crash looks really cool, and I would believe them. But let’s blackbox the sport for a moment and take a look at the role Twitter plays in public events.
Social networking sites have been co-hosting election coverage since 2006. This makes sense, since Americans have been going to the Internet for their news for a while now. But why has it taken this long to get a social media company to recognize sports? Sure you can “Like” the Super Bowl on Facebook or follow North Carolina Chapel Hill’s Women’s Soccer team on twitter, but there’s no Pinterest-sponsored Indy Race car team and the Brazilian Football league isn’t covered in Orkut banners. The domain host Go Daddy has objectified Danica Patrick for some time now (double sports points for doing it during the Super Bowl) but they aren’t a social media company.
Here’s my theory on social media’s mum stance on sports: Most sports teams are geographically based, and you do not want to pledge an allegiance to one team and lose the loyalty of other areas. These are global public spaces and to align yourself with something even the size of a country, means preferring one geographically bound community over another. Why doesn’t this apply to other companies? Well, it does- but selling trucks, bandwidth, and Doritios is a different beast than social media. Social media is public space, and public space is meant to facilitate and enable communication, not take sides in it. (Unless, of course, the ability of your customers to engage in communication is up for debate.) Twitter’s move into NASCAR keeps with my theory. NASCAR teams are not geography based, and Twitter is covering the whole race, not a single team. Just like a presidential debate, Twitter will be taking on the role of curator, not partisan.
Secondly, consider sports franchises as the first social media: Companies who look to draw in large crowds and sell their eyeballs to advertisers. They do not need these young bucks running around claiming that information wants to be free: the NBA, MLB, and NFL all have proprietary paywall systems and are doing just fine. I’ll leave the last word to a good friend of mine that works at ESPN/ He had this much to say on the matter:
@DA_Banks Short answer sports make too much money for FB and twitter to break in right now. Monday Night football cost ESPN $15.2 billion
— altonncf (@altonncf) May 19, 2012
@DA_Banks Long answer social media and twitter particularly functions as additional and more specialized commentary to games
— altonncf (@altonncf) May 19, 2012
@DA_Banks CBS did use FB to hose their streaming March Madness last year, but they charge for it now
— altonncf (@altonncf) May 19, 2012
@DA_Banks Baseball and basketball both have streaming services you have to pay for. Not sure if NBC's SNF cast has a facebook platform
— altonncf (@altonncf) May 19, 2012
@altonncf can I use this in a post?
— david a banks (@DA_Banks) May 19, 2012
@DA_Banks Sure
— altonncf (@altonncf) May 19, 2012
You can follow david on twitter, wherein he will almost never talk about sports: @da_banks
Comments 1
david ronfeldt — May 20, 2012
as an occasional fan of both cyborgology and nascar, i’d like to comment: there’s a better link between the two than twitter at pocono. it’s the nature of communications that accompany (augment?) high-speed multi-car draft-line dynamics in nascar races at the huge oval race-tracks at (and only at) daytona and talladega.
at those two tracks, two cars drafting together, running nose-to-tail, gain aerodynamic advantages for long stretches, and thus go faster than any car speeding alone. drivers can get ahead only by organizing into opportunistic drafting partnerships. normally, the more cars in line, the faster they go, easily passing lone cars (including cars that get squeezed out of a draft line). in this game, out-competing depends on out-cooperating in episodic ever-shifting alliances.
what may be pertinent for cyborgology is that arranging these fluid alliances during a race depends partly on radio communications between the driver on the track, his/her spotters high above, and the crew chief in the pits. then agreements to cooperate, if only for a few laps, are arranged via radio or in-person chats with competing teams. it’s not twitter, but it’s still reflective of cyborgology.
my old paper on "social science at 190 mph" is out-dated by now, but if you are interested, it maintains, still fairly accurately, that “This provides a curious laboratory for several social science theories: (1) complexity theory, since the racers self-organize into structures that oscillate between order and chaos; (2) social network analysis, since draft lines are line networks whose organization depends on a driver's social capital as well as his human capital; and (3) game theory, since racers face a "prisoner's dilemma" in seeking drafting partners who will not defect and leave them stranded.”
(source: http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/727/636 )
if i were to revise and update the paper today, perhaps i’d add a new section on cyborgology theory too!? onward.