The other (uglier) side of social media

I've long been worried about the implications of Georgia student athletes on social media sites. We know Coach Richt won't ban them, so it's really just a matter of time before something even larger than AJs jersey happens. 


Well, Dean Legge is flipping the coin and urging fans to stop living and breathing football players' status updates and tweets. I'm proud to say I've already stopped following several even before reading his article for some of the reasons he outlines. I don't stalk players and dissect each word trying to decipher their meaning. But you can't help but be faced with the tweets and the postings at times. And many I'd rather not be faced with...others I tend to enjoy.


In the end I guess it's all about what you want. For instance, I don't follow each and every football player on Twitter. But I created a list that collects most of their tweets for me (and anyone who follows the list) whenever I want to read them. So in essence I choose to be on the fringe of the team's public social media experience. I can step closer or further away just as easily.


But I'll never get too close. I've seen too much of what the ugly underbelly of BookFace and Twitter can look like. Legge puts it best when calling out the stalkers that take every Fake Isaiah Crowell FaceBook post and copy it onto a message board:

"The train wreck is inevitable… you don’t want to be a part of it."

Amen.