Rashard Mendenhall and Chris Johnson Teach Fans a Valuable Lesson About Twitter

Rashard Mendenhall and Chris Johnson know a thing or two about stirring the pot in the world of social media.

From Mendenhall’s controversial tweets about the way we handled the death of Osama Bin Laden, to Johnson’s angry tweets about the police and racial profiling, both men have created quite a reaction in the Twitter Universe.

But why do we give them so much power?

These days, social media isn’t a hobby. It’s a form of communication. It’s an endless stream of information that we must read, digest, detest or dismiss. For the incessant ramblings of friends and family in status updates and tweets about viewpoints, we seem to ignore it. Rarely does it cause a stir.

Yet with athletes we can’t help but be drawn to their viewpoints and their incessant ramblings. Regardless of the topic, it tends to create an intense reaction. But to what end?

Why must we take the tweets of athletes so seriously?

Mendenhall’s comments about Bin Laden and 9/11 were anything but politically correct, but at what point have we put so much stock in the ramblings of an NFL running back that we must be so bothered by his opinion, which isn’t our own?

Maybe it’s because we agree, at least in part, with his sentiments. Perhaps we hold a hidden belief that our reaction to Bin Laden’s death was not tasteful. Or perhaps, our anger is drawn from an opposing view point that threatens us and makes us question whether we are right. Surely it must be one of the two.

Why the need for such anger if Mendenhall is so clearly wrong?

With Chris Johnson, the stakes are different. His comments weren’t quite as controversial, but yet touch on a topic(race) that is still very sensitive. Yet we, instead of waiting for the story to develop(if there is a story at all) digest this information and react as if it’s news. We weren’t there, we don’t know the story, but we believe it and retweet it.

We have to learn that in the 24-hour news cycle, we cannot believe everything we read and cannot allow ourselves to be affected by that which we do read. The information is too vast and the opinions are too varied to simply read a Twitter page and make judgments or allow our passion to overwhelm us.

The longer we allow Twitter to be reacted to as it happens, the closer and closer we get to a community of social media that believes in half-truths, forms opinions and spews hatred without ever allowing the natural evolution of a story or the presence of a productive and progressive debate.

Simply said, we should be patient and thoughtful about what we read on Twitter, especially when it's an athlete that's saying it. Twitter allows a person to pass along information within a second. Let’s not digest and condemn that quickly.