Pick and Scroll: our relationship with the NBA and pop culture in the age of social media

We’re almost to the start of the NBA season, and with that, the media and content machine surrounding it is in full throttle. Like every brand, the NBA has become subject to the attention economy. You see it with sports networks and social media personalities running their usual glut of hot-take programming and posting every somewhat controversial training camp quote they can. To them, it’s a reality show, and it sells. NBA and most modern sports coverage combine America’s favorite pastimes of drama, competition, tribalism, and athletic feats into one sleek package aimed directly at the terminally online. It’s all become another part of the social media ecosystem where it’s about what people are saying rather than what they’re doing. This is symptomatic of how we consume content and interact with the world now. Keeping a conversation going and the attention around that conversation is what’s important, regardless of whether someone is actually watching the games or not. Like so many other things basketball has become this 2D representation of itself that just lives on social media, where everything’s been abstracted away from what’s actually happening in the real world. I love Basketball, it’s the only sport I really follow, but it serves as a poster child for how people’s relationship with sports and pop culture has changed due to technology and the current media environment. 

First, we need to talk about why the NBA is so well suited for the attention economy. The NBA is a much smaller league than the MLB or NFL. Each player can have a greater voice in the media because of this. Not only that, but we actually see more of them. There are only 10 players on a court at a time and the court isn’t that big. It’s much easier to know who the players are, especially the important ones. Basketball is obviously a team sport but one player can make a huge difference and play almost the entire game, which leads to greater exposure. Those players aren’t just limited to playing offense or defense either, they can be a part of every action on the court. Players also have a much stronger union with the ability to advocate for themselves and what they believe. (Sometimes even to the detriment of their teams.) This isn’t to say the NBA is better or worse than other leagues, but there’s a potent mix of accessibility, talent, and freedom that fits right into the social media ecosystem. 

Due to the strength of individual personalities and all of these factors, the NBA is perfect for the non-stop online culture of today. The league is one big Hype House. More players have their own brands and cult followings than almost any other sport. Podcasts and all sorts of media deals get launched every day. Individual players can garner huge amounts of attention from all of this coverage, which is exactly what our current economy is built on. It’s why so many people know who Steph Curry or LeBron is, but they also know who Kyle Kuzma is. (No shade to Kyle, just using him as an example of someone who’s not a superstar but is still somewhat popping on social media and in the culture.) People know NFL personalities like Tom Brady or the Mannings, but I’d wager people might know more of the minor NBA characters than they do the NFL ones. Not only do they have more attention put on them, but NBA players are marketed more as characters. This isn’t on them, but like I said at the top, the media treats it like it’s a reality show. Take trade requests, they happen in the NFL but they’re more rare and players have fewer options in executing them. In the NBA they become huge sources of content. Dame Lillard requested out of Portland during the summer, and it drove the news cycle for months. Every week there’d be a new story where it was just a new way of saying there’d been no movement on a trade. Yet, people kept reading those articles and tuning into the shows because of how it was all marketed. Attention wasn’t on the sport itself but the drama and messiness around it. 

With all of this attention, there’s near-infinite content that can keep people engaged. I already mentioned the constant drip of information around trades, but it goes deeper than that. Hot takes have become a whole industry on to themselves, it’s what the modern ESPN is built on. Football and other sports have their moments but nothing spins the wheels of these shows like basketball does. Basketball has basically become a year-round sport. Baseball and football off-seasons are fairly quiet, basketball though is a different beast. At this point, it’s like the entire league hits shuffle during the summer. Huge trades and free agent signings happen where some of the best players switch teams. This gives the media a lot of room to work with and things to speculate on even if they know nothing. That speculation is at the heart of the attention economy and online discourse. It’s why Kevin Durant called NBA writers “Blog Boys” on a podcast a few years back. “Blog Boy” was his term for people who know nothing about the sport but will write all of this crazy speculation about it. He made a great point, there’s so much attention around the NBA that pure speculation sells. Writers can have no sources, post some wild tweet, have it go viral, and all of sudden it’s the main topic of the morning shows. Careers have been made doing just that. Real sports journalism is so rare, that it’s surprising when you hear those shows actually talk about the sport. 

Speculation and discourse around that speculation feeds directly into how the internet is structured today. Social media platforms are designed so that you keep wanting to hit refresh and never leave the app. NBA content is ideal for that, there’s always a new story or highlight when you hit refresh. Basketball is in no way the most popular sport in America, but you wouldn’t know that if you got all of your information from X (deep sigh). NBA Twitter as it was formerly known was and is a cultural phenomenon, where you have fans, writers, and players all playing a part in the conversation. On its best days, it’s an amazing town square, on its worst days it's as bad as a Call of Duty lobby (which believe or not a lot of players stream themselves playing, you gotta love social media). Despite the chaos, NBA Twitter actually drove a lot of people to be fans of the sport. Some of these fans though aren’t really watching the games. They’re hooked to the constant drip of hot takes, highlights, and out-of-context quotes. Watching games isn’t incentivized because it doesn’t help social media companies make money. Even the traditional media companies who broadcast the games are starting to pivot to easily consumable surface-level content because that’s where the money is. Like everything else in culture today, the focus is no longer on the actual activity, it’s on the discourse, and the discourse about the discourse around the activity. 

Discourse for the sake of discourse isn’t a problem unique to the NBA. Every part of pop culture has been hit by it. We’re seeing it now branch into the NFL with Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift coverage. All of this shows how the attention economy and speed of information have altered how we engage with things in the world. We watch sports to see people who’ve worked their whole lives to get to where they’re and do some amazing things in real-time. Watching highlights is cool but it’s so much more fulfilling to watch someone do something incredible live. One of my favorite sports memories is watching Game 7 of the 2016 NBA finals. Off-court, there were a ton of storylines being talked about but there was also incredible play on the court. Kyrie’s three-point shot and Lebron’s block at the end of the game were absolutely unreal to watch live. We were all on the edge of our seats and in disbelief at what we were seeing. Emotions like that don’t come from highlights or social media posts because you miss all of the context from the game itself. 

That context is what everyone is missing by following the league as if it just exists on social media. It’s what we miss when we follow anything just for the easily consumable superficial details that can fit in a post. Whether it’s basketball, a TV show, or any other piece of culture, there’s a huge difference between actually engaging with it and simply following it all on Twitter (I mean X *deep sigh again*). We’ve been trained to just get the quick hit of dopamine from a piece of content and then move on to the next post. That training makes it so we think we don’t actually need to watch the game. We just need to hear what someone else thinks about the game or watch 40 seconds out of 48 min, but we lose a lot from that. We lose our humanity that way because we lose the experience and it’s another place where we just fill our heads with other people’s thoughts and opinions. Do you even like Basketball if all you’re doing is reading other people’s takes on it? Again, no shade on anyone, I’ve been guilty of this in the past, especially when my own life is super busy. There are a ton of games and a lot to keep track of. It’s something to think about though, not just in the context of the NBA, but in the context of everything we watch, read, or listen to. Living on the surface of everything without ever actually taking part in the experience is no life to live. There’s so much to enjoy about life by actually being with things and experiencing them for what they are. Don’t rob yourself of that just to read what the blog boys are saying, well except maybe this blog boy. Log off and tune into a game sometime or whatever it is you’re into. I promise life is a lot more interesting and meaningful that way.