Twitter Trash Talking

It is no secret that the NCAA Men's 2011 Championship Game was anything less than terrible. Butler and UConn, the two contending teams, shared the lowest combined points scored in the first half in any championship game in NCAA history. "Butler shot a horrid 18.8 percent from the field" says Erin Westside in the April 5th blog from Sports, Media & Society entitled "Twitter users compare men's basketball to women's game."

In summary, the blog basically discusses the horrific events that

comprised the Men's Championship Game and the way they were discussed on social networking sites, twitter in particular. This connects to our class enormously just because of the way in which these tweeters compared the terrible men's game to women's basketball in general. They quoted CBS Analyst Roland S. Martin in saying "It is not a stretch to say that the women’s national championship game will be far more interesting." Although the men's game definitely deserved criticism, it is completely out of line to compare it to the women's sport. It's simply degrading.

It is important to analyze the different ways in which the media interpret and frame men's and women's sports, especially basketball. March Madness is such a televised and commercialized production; But the way in which they discuss the women's game is never the same way they discuss the men's game. In Women and Sports in the United States, there is a piece written by Michael A. Messner, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, and Kerry Jensen entitled "The Gendered Language of Televised Sport." They argue a similar point: "Much of the

continued salience of sport as an institutional site for the construction and legitimation of masculine power lies in its role as a mass-mediated spectacle. There has been a boom in female athletic participation, but the sports media has been very slow to reflect it" (266). This is the idea that the media are constantly reconstructing and re-framing the way in which men's and women's sports are accepted and portrayed by the general public.

The major advancements of technology that have come about in the late 20^th and early 21^st century have been extremely helpful in advancing the importance of society in modern society. But it should not be used to degrade women’s sports when comparing them to poorly executed men’s sports.