The Olympics have dominated much of our attention the past week. And as I suggested in my column last week, nobody deserves the attention or the applause more than these dedicated young athletes. However, there is one side effect to watching, listening to and reading about the Games I find bothersome. And it came up the other night just before the women’s soccer semi-final match between Team Canada and Team U.S.A. Somebody asked an analyst how important the game was for the Canadian women.
“Hugely,” she said. “It’s the most important game ever.”
Well, OK. I grant you the game had a lot of significance. Someone pointed out that the Canadian women were looking for their first win against the American women in 27 soccer games. Somebody else said if the Canadians won the game and went on to defeat Japan, it would be the first time that a Canadian team had won a summer team sport gold since 1936. Yes. Yes. Yes. I get it. It was “hugely” important. But why do things always have to be such high stakes endeavours? Why is it always do or die? Why isn’t it just an important game, but a “hugely important” game? I’ve had enough gratuitous superlatives!
We in the media are often to blame. Just look at some of the comments, assessments and headlines of the past week – particularly around the Olympics coverage. On Sunday, for example, the Toronto Star called the athletes’ performance the day before, an “Epic day for Canada.” Yes, Rosie MacLennon won a gold in women’s trampoline, swimmer Ryan Cochrane finished with the silver in the men’s 1,500-metre freestyle, and cyclists Tara Whitten, Gillian Carleton and Jasmin Glaesser took bronze in the women’s team pursuit. Wonderful! Deserved for the athletes! But, epic? No.
The Globe and Mail called Usain Bolt’s 100-metre dash “historic.” The London Times used the same word for its tally of medals, equalling the number the British team won at Beijing. Several of the electronic media in the GTA referred to Simon Whitfield’s crash in the men’s triathlon “tragic.” I guess because the Pierre, Baron de Coubertain, encouraged the world’s amateurs to be “swifter, higher, stronger,” reporters and journalists have to cover these events with those superlatives in mind. Anything less just isn’t worth saying or writing.
Of course, the media’s choice of superlatives isn’t restricted to sport. The other night, the newspapers and electronic media referred to NASA’s landing of that Mars rover as “miraculous.” My guess is that the scientists – some of them Canadian – who laboured for years to invent the technology, consider all possible logistical problems and campaign for the funding might be offended. I think they would emphasize that landing this probing vehicle on a frozen planetary surface, 566 million kilometres away, had nothing to do with miracles and more to do with skill and forethought. But again, media writers have to come up with new ways to describe these things.
Meanwhile, the media in the GTA still refer to that shooting in the Danzig Street area a couple of weeks ago as “a mass shooting.” Please don’t misunderstand. The gunplay was awful and the loss of two lives worse, but I don’t understand why we have to attach such dire descriptions to these things. This is simply a plea for cooler heads as we attempt to describe and cope with these events.
I think another reason for this kind of language is society’s recent fascination for social media. Because this form of communication is so subjective, so unedited and unbalanced, so dependent on a 140-character lexicon, it makes its prime users think only in terms of superlatives.
If it’s happening in front of me, the Twitter-user figures, it must be so totally, singularly, universally, incredibly, stunningly unique that it could never have happened anywhere, at anytime to anybody but me.
How do I break it to the Twitter-verse, that there’s nothing new under the sun? And equally important, how do I impress upon those who wield such incredible power in the world, not to consider a flurry of chatter on social media channels as an indication of majority thinking. Not so long ago, a respected colleague on a live radio program asked for Tweets to a point made on the air. Within a few hours the broadcaster’s Twitter in-box had flooded with response. He began quoting some of the Tweets as an indication of strong feelings in his audience. But by the end of his program, he was suggesting that “most people think…” based entirely on the subjective views of those who’d texted him on Twitter.
I believe superlatives are important, but maybe a soccer game can be something less than “hugely important,” stupidity with a gun something other than a “mass shooting” and social media opinion not always “majority” thinking.
I strongly – OK sort of strongly – suggest moderation.