I mean, you gotta get together with people invested in the game.
Yeah, but that isn’t different than anyone else. My cousin’s kid was the center for KSU’s women’s basketball team. And while normally I wouldn’t watch college basketball (women’s team or not), when I went to the games I had fun cheering her and her teammates on. I will say even though I am not a big sports person, when watching sports live there definitely is a different energy that sucks you into it.
But yeah, if she was looking bored, looking at her phone every time they cut to her, I’d maybe be like, “what is the point?” But she is cheering, saying “what the fuck” on bad calls, high fiving people, and ‘rasselin’ with Brittney Mahomes.
And I am sure there are a lot of dads who are football fans, who if the don’t fumble the opportunity, can enjoy the games with their kid(s) because they have an adjacent interest that caused them to meet together.
My lovely wife bought us tickets to the Chiefs Pats game in Dec, which was the first time I’ve seen them live since I moved out of KC 21 years ago (sigh). All of the dads had on Pats jerseys and almost every one of their daughters had on Kelce jerseys or other Chiefs gear. I kind of felt bad for them having lived through the legacy era they experience only to see their kids turn to the dark side, but it is also clear that they’re supportive of their interests because those jerseys are not cheap! They must have been grinding their teeth placing the order.
When I went to see the Dodgers (pre-pitch timer, obviously), every few plays action stopped to capture some random celebrity in the stands, and half of the time they didn’t even acknowledge the camera.
You would have loved it, then. They were all trudging up to their seats, dragging along a gaggle of Chiefs fans and looking completely defeated before the first snap. Walking out of the stadium I found myself in a crowd of red and let out a “How ‘bout those…!” and expected to get knocked out right there. I didn’t even hear a peep (excepts for the very loud “CHIEFS!!!”).
They were really chill, actually, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a nice, warm bath in schadenfreude.
So the people sharing that the Taylor Swift thing is a psy-op are conducting the real psy-op.
I used to work in survey research. Learning that a push poll is a(n effective) thing is all kinds of infuriating that I find difficult to put into words.
Manipulating the results of a poll by careful framing of the questions has been a known technique for ages. Plenty of ballot measures across the country are made obscure by making the vote to get the desired outcome the non-intutitve vote. Just being asked “have you heard?” Or “did/do you know?” will often drive people to look up a topic, thus making the algorithms push more like content, etc. etc.
