During Game 4 of the Western Conference finals, the basketball world collectively held its breath, as one of the game’s most exciting stars took a bump reminiscent of a WWE superstar.
The NBA’s MVP, Steph Curry, was attempting to block a shot in transition. One pump-fake later, he landed violently enough that an arena full of Houston Rocket fans went silent. No one, not even the opposing team’s fan base, could muster up some misguided glee in Curry’s anguish.
Then it happened. Everyone quickly earned their PhD in brain trauma. Sadly, it isn’t really all that surprising.
Twitter is about that life. Everyone is an expert. Dorothy from Topeka might be a child-care worker by day, but by night she’s a know-it-all in 19th-century Spanish literature; Dave is a transit worker in Philly most of the time, yet he moonlights as a Mickey Mouse Clubhouse historian from the hours of 6 p.m. to midnight; Ralph never even picked up a basketball while cooking the leanest burgers in Wilkes-Barre, although even he knows when teams should use a high-screen action, or which players have to be incorporated in pick-and-roll situations.
So it goes.
Everyone, no matter their background, is an expert in something they have never truly studied. This happens mostly because they “like” whatever subject they are talking about. Watched enough episodes of Breaking Bad that you know what makes for dramatic picture-box viewing? Good… you’re now a pop-culture expert!
I get it. I’m screaming at a lead-painted wall at the moment. You’ll say, “But Joe, what makes you any better than us in these endeavors?” Not much, honestly. Outside of putting in my time, watching games as often as you do, having my DVR filled with sporting events that are over six months old, reading — approximately — a billion articles a day, and doing a slew of other things which help educate me as best as possible on the subjects I discuss, there’s no reason to quantify my opinions as being more expertly crafted than yours.
No matter. I wasn’t one of the freshly finished interning doctors who popped up on the mean streets of Twitter on Monday night.
The ranges of thoughts on what happened to Steph Curry were wide, deep, and filled with a soil that is probably better off being used to fertilize crops than to serve as the foundation of your thought-house.
It all started harmlessly enough. Sane, logical, and emotionally attached humans showed signs of worry for Golden State’s best player. Sure, there were some people who took the sickening stance of celebrating what could have been a much worse injury, but the jig is up on those folks — we already accept the fact that they’re as normal members of the human species as is that stuffed animal in your den.
Then, however, people started formulating their medical opinions. “It must be a concussion” to “he shouldn’t go back in the game,” all the way to the “probably out for the rest of the series” spectrum of tweets were hurled at our computers 140 characters or less at a time.
Sigh…
I get it. We immediately become the most negative-thinking people in the world when something or someone we like seems to be in danger of operating the same way we have grown accustomed to. But, uh, yeah — there is something I don’t get. Why is there such a need to rush to some diagnosis on something nobody could actually know? Steph Curry fell, hard, and that’s all we actually knew at the time. If we waited a few minutes, the Golden State medical staff would tell us what Curry was — or was not — suffering from.
But we didn’t do that. We’re all doctors! At least on Twitter, that is. There isn’t time for trained professionals to study their patient when we can come up with a bunch of words that might ultimately result in a retweet or favorite!
It didn’t end there, however. Conspiracy theorists started to come out of the woodwork. Because too many sports fans can’t empty their craniums of NFL talk, people turned to questioning Golden State letting Curry go back in the game.
“What are the protocols? Did they even check him correctly? If this game were a blowout, Curry wouldn’t play. He shouldn’t be in because {insert uneducated medical opinion here}.” So much fun, right?
Wrong.
It is stupid. If a person wanted to have a somewhat educated discussion concerning the impact of the fall on Curry or on the series itself, it could have been had. Granted, it would have to be in the vacuum of limited information, foresight, and knowledge available at the time, but it could have been done.
Asking if Curry would be mentally shaken going forward, or if Houston could build confidence and turn that into momentum, or if any non-brain-trauma damage might alter Curry’s game for the rest of the playoffs — all of those topics could have been discussed.
But nope. Doctors were everywhere on Monday night.
Making declarative statements on medical topics such as a potential concussion on Twitter isn’t the end of the world. Such statements are probably a bit irresponsible, dumb, and unnecessary, but they won’t result in any of these Twitter doctors losing their day jobs.
The pattern at work here is the continued social media trend of misinformation being thrusted into the eyes of people who might be unable to separate opinions from facts — which will inevitably result in uneducated thoughts being spread throughout the Internet as fact.
That is not exactly ideal.
Sure, we would all like to think everyone is as smart as us and will be able to separate someone’s opinion on Twitter or Facebook from fact, but then again… they probably didn’t earn their doctorate in world-wide-interwebs medical jargon or presenting opinions as facts yet.
Could we all simply slow it down a bit? There’s no need to be the first person to comment on every single even going on, much as there’s no need to share an opinion on a subject you know you’re not qualified to discuss smartly. So let’s all just take a deep breath, relax, and go back to Twitter University. I think we’ve been ripped off — I believe TU is a good ole diploma mill.