Blog post #8 for Monday’s reading on March 30, 2020

Reading Summary

The technology now exist to watch live events after they happened. Klosterman discusses in his article why “watching a prerecorded sporting event less pleasurable than watching the same game live?” If he knows the game is finished, it is hard for him to stay interested in it. He instead skips ahead to watch the ending of the game. The drama in these games are lost because you fast forward past the times where nothing is happening. It is during these times of nothing that the pressure is accumulating for the viewer. Watching it after the fact consciously distances the viewer from the actual experience. An example of this is watching Ricky Gervais’ hosting the Golden Globe Awards. His jokes had a poor reception for live viewers, but that was not the same for people who watched it later. This demonstrates the different levels of reality among the audience that were at the event, the people watching it live, and the people watching it later. There is nothing at stake if the event already happened. You are incontrol of what information you know and whether you spend your time watching. People also think they play a role in what is happening in these events when they watch them live. People will know what happened in this game from other things such as the internet, before they actually watch it. When you watch these events in real time, anything is possible, but when you watch it later, you might already know of the insane things that happened during it or the outcome. Watching a game second hand will never replace watching it live. 

Source: Klosterman, C. (2011). “Space, time and DVR mechanics.” Grantland.

Outside Example 

An example would be Bo Jackson. Bo Jackson is widely considered as one of the most athletic people to ever live. He played nearly every sport and is infamously known for his “Bo knows” campaign. He played professional football and baseball simultaneously. He would go on to get injured in football with a hip dislocation that cut his football career short and his baseball career was soon to follow. He is now most well known by people who didn’t see him back when he played because of his ESPN 30 for 30 “You Don’t Know Bo” which highlights his younger life, his sports career, and what he is doing now in his 50’s. 

Video of Bo Baseball: https://youtu.be/dv12vY_ZN7M

Video of Bo Football: https://youtu.be/-RjFR-3GTRU

Video of Bo Injury: https://youtu.be/gyteepf2hJs

Reading Connection

Watching older sports highlights or games are hard to do. As much as I like Bo Jackson, it is hard for me to be interested in watching his games and highlights even, because I know that his injury comes and ends his career early. There is something about knowing what happens that ruins the kind of star studded reaction some people have about him. I feel a lot of people my age who didn’t get to see him play sports live, find it hard to comprehend just how impactful and polarizing he was as an athlete because we see him as some one that got hurt. If you were to ask people who the best athlete of all time is, people my age would probably say Lebron James, but older people would might say Bo Jackson, because there is a different reality when it comes to how you experience their athleticism and sports careers.