Social Issues; The Perils of Getting Over with Internet Fans, Digital Age and More

[Travicity]

Welcome back and if you celebrate Christmas then I hope you had a nice holiday. If not, I hope you enjoyed the free day or two off from work and got to catch up on all the TV you've been piling up on your DVR. In either case, let's kick the week off with some more of the flotsam and jetsam that drifts through my mind on a regular basis.

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The online wrestling fanbase is notoriously difficult to please, but there are some people who can pull it off. In general, the internet likes guys who are solid workers from a technical standpoint, and it doesn't hurt if they have some cool hard hitting or high flying stuff in their repertoire. It helps if you're small as well, because the Internet Wrestling Fandom Charter, Rule #4 states that there's no such thing as a wrestler under 240 pounds who sucks and doesn't deserve to be pushed ahead of someone who's 6'7" and 275 pounds. If you have all this and also have never been pushed in main event storylines or won a World Title, you're made, and the internet fans will support you to their dying breaths. But watch out, because if you ever get that World Title, you're DEAD, and at best they'll stop caring about you and at worst, they'll turn on you outright.

Chris Benoit is a great example of the first option: everyone knew for a long time what an awesome worker he was, easily one of the best in the business, and the more he got pushed down by WCW or passed over in WWE, the more the fans got behind the guy. Even leading into Wrestlemania 20, the conspiracy theorists were out in droves, predicting that Benoit was going to get screwed out of the title yet again and screaming that Shawn Michaels was thrown into the mix, either as a way to keep Benoit from getting the title by giving Triple H somebody else to beat, a way that even if Benoit got the title Triple H wouldn't have to job to him, or simply because they didn't think Triple H vs Chris Benoit would draw as the main event of Wrestlemania by itself. But in the end, Benoit made Triple H tap out clean in the middle of the ring to win the World Title in the main event of Wrestlemania 20, and then got to celebrate with his best friend Eddy Guerrero, the WWE Champion, and the two of them celebrated in the middle of the ring with confetti falling from the roof of the arena and the fans on their feet. After all those years, there couldn't have been a more perfect, poetic scene when Benoit finally got that big win. Problem was that now that he had finally won the title, all the interest in him was gone, and when he dropped the title to Randy Orton a few months later and went back to being an upper midcarder, suddenly nobody cared anymore.

For a good example of option #2, we need to look no further than our old buddy John Cena. Everybody dumps on him now, but the guy was really over when he was doing the thug rapper gimmick back in 2003, and nobody really said anything negative about what kind of a worker he was. On the contrary, a lot of people compared him to a young Sting and were positive about his potential to develop into really strong performer over time. Even once he turned babyface he was still over, and was getting good reactions during his feuds with Big Show and Booker T. But then once he beat JBL for the WWE Title at Wrestlemania 21, all of a sudden you could barely open your web browser without reading "he can't wrestle," "his promos suck," and "turn him heel since the fans hate him anyway." None of that stuff mattered a bit before, but now that he had gotten the Magic Push, the fans turned on him.

It takes a lot of work, but the trend can be reversed. Take Jeff Jarrett, who the online fans crucified for the first several years of TNA because, as they saw it, he was the boss and was pushing himself to the World Title and wasn't doing jobs for the people who SHOULD be getting the big push. Now granted, I was never one to think of Jarrett as being a true World Title caliber guy and I do think circumstances worked to his advantage in that regard at least in WCW, but no matter what Jarrett did, he got buried online because he wasn't jerking the curtain and spending every night counting the lights. It took a situation where he was almost completely off TV for the better part of two years, came back, and then was sent home by Dixie Carter because of a personal disagreement with her new top star for the fan sentiment to turn around, because now they perceived him as being the victim of questionable politics. Now TNA was finally able to run with that and turn him into an underdog hero who got screwed and was being made to clean toilets and whatever else Eric Bischoff made him do, and suddenly the guy was over like Grover. He's back to being a heel now as part of Immortal, but there hasn't been that fan backlash because he's a middle of the road player, but I guarantee you that if he had stayed the babyface course and regained the TNA World Title, people suddenly would have started back up with, "See, I knew he was eventually going to get the title back, I knew he wasn't serious about helping anyone else get over and that he was just going to give himself the title again, and now he's going to start burying everyone again."

To be fair though, you can make the case now that even when WWE does give someone a World Title push, they still don't let them come across as strong and even though they're the champion, they're still not presented as being on the same level as the Triple H, John Cena, and Randy Orton types. CM Punk and Jack Swagger are probably the two most recent examples of guys who have gotten the title without getting a commensurate push. Sheamus is the only guy I can think of in the last few years who got pushed hard and right to the top and has consistently been portrayed as on the level of other main eventers, and even though Miz did finally get the title recently, the jury's still out on how his title reign is going to play out, but with the way the title reigns of Punk and Swagger have been handled, I don't blame anyone who has doubts. In other words, WWE has created a unique environment where there's a new level where the Cenas and Ortons of the world reside that's actually above their World Titles, so there's a new glass ceiling that exists even if you end up becoming a World Champion in that company.

This is all why I don't blame wrestlers who don't live and die by what people write about them on the internet, because even when you win, you lose in the eyes of the internet, and why would you kill yourselves trying to please people who are going to reject you for the biggest accomplishment of your career?

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To keep on the topic of the internet, there's no arguing that it has irrevocably changed the wrestling business and the fabric of our entire society. The problem I see, having grown up exactly during that crucial time period when we went from the way things were to the way they are now in terms of the explosion of the internet is that I really think that a lot of people, particularly younger folks, just get too tied into it to the point where it's difficult or even impossible for them to unplug and get back to real life. Especially with the advent of internet-ready mobile devices over the last few years, there's not many places outside of rural Mongolia where you can't find some way to get online, and it's had a noticeable effect on just about everyone and everything.

Of all those effects, though, I think the strangest one is that people don't seem to feel like the normal rules of communication apply when they're on the internet. You see people post things on their Facebook page where they're shooting their mouth off about someone they have an axe to grind with, or posting pictures of themselves lit up like a Christmas tree at some trashy club, or the things they record themselves doing and then post it on Youtube, and for some reason they think that all this just spirals off into some void from which it will never return. These people never seem to consider that anyone will ever see any of it, which I find puzzling because even though they clearly think it's safer than saying the same stuff verbally, it's actually FAR more likely to come back to bite you because instead of saying it out loud and having someone either overhear it or repeat it secondhand, now it's actually stored online for everyone to see and with the way stuff gets cached and mirrored on the internet, IT'S NEVER GOING TO GO AWAY. People are slowly starting to realize that the more it costs them jobs, lands them in legal hot water, or costs them friendships, but being that my formative years came during that transition period, it's really obvious to me that some people aren't totally cognizant of the fact that they need to be more responsible with what they do online.

To bring this back around to wrestling, you can just look back at the last few months and see several examples of people involved in the business who would do well to heed my advice. Of course the undisputed king in this category would have to be Matt Hardy, who has been posting increasingly bizarre stuff online, and whether you believe him when he says he was doing it to get fired so he can go to TNA and join Jeff, or if you believe that he had other stuff going on in his life that inspired him to do stuff like this, the fact is that it succeeded in getting him out of WWE, but would you want to hire a guy who goes on YouTube and makes a fool of himself like that? And if TNA passes on him, how quick do you think WWE is going to be to take him back? I thought that Jeff at least was smart enough to not get involved in this kind of crap, especially since he's staring down the barrel of some serious jail time, but then he cut his promo on CM Punk live and on location from Shoney's.

How about our old buddy Scott Hall? The guy gets yet another chance when TNA brings him in and pays him a lot of money to come in as a top heel, so he thanks them by doing his Last Call With Scott Hall series where he sat around in a bar, got drunk, and buried his employer. Even though TNA showed a lot more patience with him than anyone else ever would have, he still managed to get himself fired because of his conduct. And not for nothing, but with his past booze issues, do you really think it's wise to do a YouTube series from a bar? Because if he ever gets himself in legal trouble again, it's not like the videos can be used against him or anything.

Getting back to the OMEGA crew, Hurricane Helms is our new Man Of The Hour as he has spent the last couple of weeks trying to pick an internet fight with Shawn Michaels by questioning his backstage conduct and religious convictions. Forgetting for a second how pathetic and childish Helms comes off as for trying to pick the same kind of fight I see my early-teenage relatives getting into with their classmates, attacking someone's religious beliefs is a major taboo in the United States, and he is already going to come off like a jerk just by bringing that up. Plus, I don't know how he decided he's in a position to condescend to somebody about their morality, especially given his own issues in recent years.

Shawn Michaels, on the other hand, is one guy who has a Twitter account and realizes that it's not an appropriate place to vent about everything torturing his soul, and knows better than to say anything that can get him in trouble. Even though Helms has been trying to drag him into his little internet war, Shawn has completely ignored him, which is the smart move since he would have nothing to gain from it and would just make himself look stupid by playing Helms' game. He made no comment at all until people started asking him what he thought about what Helms was saying and he basically no-sold the situation and said he wasn't going to get caught up in whatever Helms is trying to accomplish.

I think that everyone would do well to follow the example Shawn Michaels has set, and if you want to vent or antagonize somebody, the internet is not the place to do it unless your true goal is just to make yourself look like a dumbass.

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That's it for now, thanks as always for reading and keep your eyes peeled because I'm going to have some DVD reviews and maybe a couple of other things up later this week, so take care and see you then!

PWI

[Metalitia]

The trouble with these kind of articles is assuming that every person who voices their opinion on wrestling over the internet is of the same mindset and as such just lists a bunch of presumptions that seemingly aren't true.

Their first example of Chris Benoit is a case in point. In my experience no one I know "turned" on Benoit until what happened and a bunch of rumours went flying around. Even then most of the people who liked Benoit previously that I know of still like him now and are sad that he's no longer with us.

Also to back up my point as to why you can't label "internet fans" as one group with a common viewpoint would be to simply take a look at a few of the people who post on these forums often.

John for example is very pro The Miz, Michael Cole, Vickie etc whereas myself for example, I'm not a fan of either of the three particularly. Smartmark is big into the indy scene and seems to like a lot of the high flyers whilst Travis seems to like all sorts, particularly the hardcore stuff like CZW.

Not all four viewpoints completely contradict one another but they are all different as well.