The subject of this week’s collection of barely coherent sentences and half-baked opinion was suggested by my partner-in-crime on the MFX Podcast; the incomparable Sir Ian Trumps. Anyone who listens to our show will know that Sir Ian is not backwards in coming forward with his opinion and he has a sense of humour that’s darker than the inside of a cat’s ass.
Surprisingly, the subject he put forward was actually quite serious and therefore took me completely by surprise. I still don’t think he came up with it himself because there were no jokes about Miz or Brick Hogan and there wasn’t a reference to a classic 1980s movie thrown in for good measure – all of which are standard ammo in the Sir Ian comedic cannon.
Anyway, the question Sir Ian wanted me to answer was: what effect has the internet and social media had on wrestling?
To answer Sir Ian’s question, we first have to go back into the mists of time, back to a time before Facebook, Twitter and Google. We’re going back to the days before E-Bay, gifs, memes and instantly accessible porn. We’re going to fire up some Huey Lewis and The News, get the DeLorean up to 88mph and take a trip back to the dark ages.
Can you believe there used to be a time when the internet didn’t exist? Crazy, right? I also know what you’re thinking; if there was no internet, how did people share amusing cat pictures with each other? Simply put, they didn’t. It was a glorious time in human history and one that made for a much less annoying world, at least for me. I hate all that comedy cat bullshit.
Back in the dark ages before the internet, life was much less stressful. You weren’t subjected to constant updates about what people were doing with their boring lives. It wasn’t like today were every single mundane moment from someone’s ultimately pointless existence is instantly shared with the world.
You’ll all be well versed in the kind of subjects that people think are interesting, but for those of you who aren’t, here’s the kind of shit that makes up 90% of status updates and tweets:
“Oh look at how nice my lunch looks, here’s a picture of it with a trendy effect on the camera to make it and me appear more interesting.”
“Hey you, yeah you, look at how cute my Dog is. LOOK! Now he’s wearing a hat. LOOK! LOOOOOK!”
“I’m supportive of a certain political/religious/sporting belief and if you aren’t, you’re wrong and I’m going to spend thousands of pointless words and hours arguing why my belief is correct and yours isn’t.”
It’s this kind of supposed ‘social’ interaction that drives me nuts, because there’s nothing social about it. It’s all about showing off your status and people being utterly desperate to appear interesting, as opposed to sharing heartfelt, interesting or important news with their friends and family.
Back in the day, if someone you knew got a new job or had a baby, they didn’t post their news on a public forum and wait for the ‘likes’ to roll in. They certainly didn’t have to find a way to announce it in less than 140 characters (#itsaboy). They used to call you on the house phone (back then it was just called ‘the phone’ because we didn’t have mobile phones) or you’d meet them in person and share the news face to face.
It wasn’t like today where you can dump someone by text or block them on Facebook and then get on with your life. You had to explain to people, directly to their face as they looked you in the eye, why you were doing something. Sounds weird and scary, right?
Pre-internet and social media, if you didn’t like a TV show or song, all you could do was tell your friends and they’d tell you to shut the fuck up, because who cares what you think about something? Your opinion was not considered important, certainly not important enough to share with the rest of humanity on a world-wide public broadcast system. Oh, how I miss those days.
So that was the dark ages for humanity before the internet and social networks. No hiding behind a virtual wall. No instant communication. No spoilers. No funny cat pictures. No relentless chatter about unimportant bullshit that invades your life on a daily basis. No phone in your pocket that instantly connects you to the rest of the world and allows you to access all of the knowledge of mankind at the click of a couple of buttons, but really is used to play Angry Birds.
While the general population were effectively scratching their status updates onto their cave walls, waiting for someone to come along and tarmac the information superhighway, what was happening in the world of professional wrestling?
Social media and instant world-wide communication were always going to be difficult for professional wrestling to accept. Especially when you consider where wrestling came from and who was running it.
Pro-wrestling is an industry born out of carnivals and run by con men. The most successful wrestling promoters are the most successful conmen. That’s not said in a negative way, because being conned is what all of pro-wrestling is based on. Protecting the con was all important, at least until Vince McMahon and his ‘sports entertainment’ revolution came along.
For years the level of secrecy and intrigue that surrounded wrestling was a thick fog that only a few select people were able to navigate through. The lengths the likes of Bill Watts, Eddie Graham and other promoters would go to in order to maintain the secrecy surrounding wrestling are legendary.
Many old time wrestlers talk about how most of them didn’t even know wrestling was a work until they had their first match, and even then it took considerable time before the veterans of the time clued the noobs in on all the inner workings of the business.
These days, thanks to the internet and Vince’s big ‘sports entertainment’ reveal in the early 90s, everyone is in on the con and many would argue that has damaged the mystery and intrigue of the business, which in turn damaged wrestling’s ability to connect with fans as they had in the past.
There’s no denying that the crowd heat back in the day regularly surpassed the crowd reactions of today. The days of heels inciting riots and babyface heroes being carried out of the arena on the shoulders of the crowd are long gone. While a large percentage of wrestling fans knew something wasn’t quite right in what they were seeing, the business was protected to such a degree that fans found it easier to suspend their disbelief. As a result, their reactions were much stronger and heartfelt than today.
Granted, crowd heat isn’t the only measure of whether or not wrestling was better or worse once the veil of secrecy was lifted. Ask any old time wrestling fan what made it so special to them and most of them will reply that it made them believe.
Today we believe nothing and accept even less, be it wrestling, news reports or what our elected leaders tell us. This is the information age and with so much information instantly accessible, there’s no doubt that some of the magic of wrestling has died off.
Fans who used to enjoy being part of the con, now spend all their time trying to unravel it to prove how smart they are. The internet and social media gives them the perfect platform to share their theories and spoilers with the whole world.
These days most people see the internet as something which can help improve a business. This wasn’t the case where the territory system was concerned. While many people rightly blame Vince McMahon for killing the territories, Bill Watts has stated that he believes if Vince hadn’t driven most of the territories out of business with his ruthless national expansion in the early 1980s, then the internet most certainly would have.
In the pre-internet days, promotions relied on being able to tour the same show, week after week, around the towns and cities within their territory. They’d have the same matches, with the same finishes for a month or six weeks at a time. As news didn’t travel so fast in the pre-internet days, this was something they could get away with. Fans would be none the wiser that they were watching the exact same show that their neighbouring town had seen the night before.
With the internet allowing instant communication, the territories would never have been able to operate their businesses in the same way as they had in the previous decades. The internet would have revealed the con that the same show was taking place, night after night, town after town. Audiences would expect more. They’d expect a different show in each town.
As most of the territories lived and died on house show attendance, this reveal would have meant a complete change in philosophy. Watts – who is much more of an expert on this subject than you or I – didn’t believe those running the territories would understand or embrace this change.
Or if they did, it would inevitably be too late and their business would be doomed to failure. This is almost exactly what happened when Vince got the jump on them all and began to gobble up their stars and TV slots in the 80s. They didn’t move with the times, they didn’t see the shift in the business and by the time they did, it was too late for them to survive.
The internet and social media have had a big hand in changing our views towards privacy. As a society, we now appear happy to provide a constant stream of information about what we’re doing, thinking and eating via social networks. Everyone knows the breaking news before it’s really broken. There’s much less secrecy in the world because so many people are constantly communicating.
So how does a business, like wrestling, that’s built on secrecy, lies and manipulation of emotions, finally embrace the advent of the internet and social media?
In the early days of the internet, those of us who dwelt on here were considered enemies by the larger promotions. We were worse than the dirt-sheets because we could share our thoughts, predictions and spread bullshit lies and misinformation about wrestlers and the promotions, to a much larger audience, much quicker than any newsletter that arrived in the mail.
With the internet being kept at arms-length by WWE for most of the last decade and a half, a real divide grew between fan and promotion. The phrase ‘Internet Wrestling Community’ has been coined and, for the longest time, was a dirty word to Vince McMahon and WWE.
The IWC were an irritant, a vocal minority. We were a bunch of spoilsports who only complained and had no real clue about wrestling because we’d never stepped in the ring and laced up a pair of boots.
In the early to mid-90s wrestling was following the example of a number of other businesses by using premium rate telephone lines to milk a few extra pails of cash from their customers. The ‘scoops’ and ‘news’ that the promotions put out there, could now be found on many internet sites. All it took was one fan to call the premium rate line, get all the information from it and then reproduce it for hundreds of other fans to read about on their website, free of charge.
So ‘the internet’ wasn’t just giving away secrets of the business or changing the way promotions operated, it was also costing promotions money. Perhaps if the promotions in question had embraced the internet, as opposed to running away from it in fear and mistrust, some money could have been made? They’d never find out because too many people in positions of power within wrestling either didn’t understand the power of the internet, or didn’t want to accept it.
In the early days of the internet, the only promotion that was truly ahead of the curve when it came to using the power of the internet was ECW. Some of the earliest internet arranged fan events took place in ECW in the mid-90s.
Now that WWE and other promotions have caught up, what’s changed in the last five years or so? The first major change has been the realisation by WWE that more people in the US have access to the internet, than have access to cable TV.
While WWE still lives and dies on pointless quarterly hour TV ratings (I could go on about how inaccurate and outdated they are, but I won’t) they have accepted that if they want to communicate to the largest percentage of their audience, they have to embrace the internet and social media.
It’s not been a smooth transition. WWE, when they first discovered Twitter, behaved like a teenage boy who had just discovered his big brother’s stash of nude mags. They went full throttle, non-stop and very well could have gone blind. They were so desperate to appear at the forefront of social media that they ended up looking completely clueless.
Those moments on RAW when Michael Cole would tell us what was trending on Twitter every 30 seconds were unbearable. It was like one of those cringe-inducing teenage nightmares when your parents try to act hip and cool in front of your friends about a band you like. Maybe they sing one of their songs or talk about how they’d like to go and see the band live. The band is then instantly placed in the ‘lame’ category because nothing your parents like is cool. The same was true with WWE and their overnight obsession with all things Twitter.
Hell, they even bought a percentage of a social media company called Tout and tried to shoved that down everyone’s throats. That’s one of the biggest mistakes WWE made in the early days of embracing social media – they failed to understand that you can’t force these things.
The use of Twitter especially has been an incredibly organic and natural process and one that can’t be guided or shaped by the whims and needs of a company. In fact it does the exact opposite and Twitter now has influence on the direction of companies and even governments. Given the freedom that Twitter allows and given how much WWE want to control every aspect of their company, it’s amazing they’ve actually been able to embrace Twitter so much in recent times.
That loss of control allows fans to instantly communicate with their favourite WWE superstars and sometimes even get a reply. Occasionally these exchanges are friendly and polite but the majority of the time it’s fans trolling wrestlers for a reaction, or wrestlers saying something dumb and then claiming their Twitter was hacked. It’s amazing how much Twitter hacking of wrestler’s accounts goes on after the bars close…
There’s no doubt that the way WWE and TNA have embraced social media has allowed them to interact with their fan base quickly and the promotional advantages social media gives can’t be over looked. The only drawback at the moment appears to be capturing that social media buzz and instant communication and then converting that into cash for the company. Something trending on Twitter during RAW or IMPACT is, in the grand scheme of things, relatively worthless.
What still drives the business of both companies is TV revenue and PPV buys (along with merchandise, licensing, etc) and neither company has yet been able to work out how to use the internet and social media to improve those main revenue streams. Perhaps it will take the next step in the technology (reliable IPPV) that will see wrestling finally crack the puzzle of how to make money out of social media.
After resisting for years and in fact doing everything they could to belittle and downplay the internet and the fans who reside here, pro-wrestling has dragged itself out of the primordial soup and evolved into a business that actually embraces the internet and in particular social media. It’s been a long journey and one that doesn’t appear to be ending any time soon.
The business is more open and exposed than at any time in the past – which is both a positive and a negative. It’s a positive in that there’s now an instant connection between promotion and fan. There’s a ton of ways the promotions can use social media and the internet to promote their product.
The negative is that the increase exposure has lessened what made wrestling so appealing in the first place, namely the wonder and the mystery and the sense that these guys and girls were larger than life superstars.
These days, when you can see what CM Punk eats for lunch or share in what songs are currently rocking Cody Rhodes’ IPod, there’s a different kind of connection from back in the pre-internet days. We see the wrestlers doing what we do. We see them away from the TV cameras. We see them enjoying the same things as us. In a way it draws us closer to them as people, but at the same time they’re playing a character on TV and that blurring of the lines can result in fans actually becoming more disconnected from their heroes than before.
No longer are they the larger than life heroes or villains of old. Now they’re just as whiny and annoying as the rest of us. With their selfies, pictures of their dogs and their lame ass tweets about their work out or what protein shake they’re drinking that morning.
The aura and the mystery is gone and what’s left is a confusing mix of fans who think the person on Twitter is the same person as the character they see on TV and the wrestlers who have to be both, all the while dealing with the constant trolling and abuse that is fired their way. When you think about it, it’s probably not much fun being a wrestler on Twitter. I mean CM Punk must spend at least an hour a week solely correcting people’s grammar. How boring.
The internet has allowed fans more access and more information on wrestling than ever before. It’s resulted in a lot of fans who think they’re smarter about the ins and outs of the business than they actually are. It’s also resulted in an online wrestling ‘news’ industry that thrives on gossip, fake stories, scandal and trash. That’s one of the most disappointing aspects of the internet revolution of the past fifteen years.
There’s no doubt the wrestling industry has changed since the advent of the internet and social media. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing in the long run is unknown. Maybe in ten years we’ll know the true effect. Until then all we can do is embrace the changes as they come along and hope they will be positive for the wrestling business and us as fans.
What’s more likely is it’ll become an even more annoying, fake, gossip filled, shit hole of humanity, that will eventually disappear up its own collective asshole or end up controlling us all in some horrible Skynet/Google/Twitter brain controlling software. In fact I’m sure that process has already started…
I’ve gone on long enough this week. I’m off to Tweet a story about how an actual smashed pumpkin is the leading contender to buy TNA (come on, it couldn’t be any worse than the current brain trust running it) and I’ll let you know how many sites pick up the story as real.
Hopefully I’ve answered Sir Ian’s question and hopefully some of this has been mildly entertaining and dragged you away from trolling John Cena for five minutes. If you’ve enjoyed this article, you can always follow me on Twitter which is @MFXDuckman. Or even better, why not check out the MFX podcast I’ve been shamelessly plugging?
We’ve recently changed the format of the show, we now have a TNA specific show which goes up at the start of the week and covers TNA and reviews IMPACT. Then we have a WWE specific show which covers news from WWE and reviews RAW. Basically we’re bookending your week with two hilarious, informative and downright entertaining podcasts. Don’t believe me? Then just head to www.mfxpodcast.com and check the show out for yourself.
As always, thanks for reading. Make sure you continue to support SLTD and all the great contributors here.
Until next time…
Peace
Duckman
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