Oh, The Humanities! After sifting through thousands of tweets about the Toronto Blue Jays, a researcher says it's a crock that sports unite people

Thousands of academics are gathering in Regina for the annual Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, beginning Saturday. They will present papers on everything from the new cultural dynamic of apologism to why Jezebel in the Hebrew Bible talks like a man. In its Oh, The Humanities! series , the National Post showcases some of the most interesting research.

After sifting through thousands of tweets about the Toronto Blue Jays, a researcher in Regina is challenging the notion that fandom has a magical ability to unite people. It was a notion peddled constantly during the Jays’ electrifying reign as a playoff contender in 2015 and 2016 – beer commercials, politicians in ball caps, all heralding the official Blue Jays slogan: Come Together.

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But according to University of Regina PhD candidate Katie Sveinson, Blue Jays fans on Twitter give a starker portrait. In her ongoing research, to be presented to the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences on May 30, Sveinson found Blue Jays fans have created their own hierarchies, debasing each other based on knowledge, behaviour or commitment to the team.

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Photo by AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Sveinson, herself an ardent Green Bay Packers fan, was driven to start her research after an altercation in 2014, during a trip to Seattle to watch an NFL regular season game between the Packers and the Seattle Seahawks. She saw a man in a Packers jersey on the street. Another man approached the Packers fan and shouted “Fuck the Packers!”

It made her uneasy. “I don’t want to be yelled at during the game. I don’t want to be heckled,” Sveinson said. If the whole point of sports spectatorship is leisure, than why causing such anxiety?

While barbs between opposing fans are to be expected, the bulk of her research focuses on the dysfunctional relationships between fans of the same team. “I was just trying to maybe critique the notion that sport fandom is a solely unifying experience,” she said.

Throughout the 2017 season, she compiled 850,000 tweets all mentioning @BlueJays, #BlueJays or the slogan #LetsRise. From there, she narrowed her data pool to 8,500 tweets that also mentioned fan, fans or fandom. The point was to watch how fans, just by talking to one and other, can reinforce certain cultural values. The exercise is known as critical discourse analysis, a method of looking at how every language contributes to societal views. What she saw – through the unenviable task of reading and rereading thousands of tweets from fans of an underperforming team in 2017 – was a culture as prone to exclusion as inclusion.

Photo by AP Photo/Ted S. Warren

Reading a sampling of the tweets Sveinson found, the idea of a team bringing people together in any meaningful way does start to look like a fantasy. “Sometimes it felt very exhausting,” she said.

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The dominant group, or at least the most vocal, are seemingly peaceful and positive. They are the truest fans, supplicants almost, who preach unconditional support, ballpark decorum and the importance of having wealth of baseball knowledge. Fans who pay attention only when the team’s winning, who interfere at the stadium by scooping up live balls, who make angry demands to fire a coach or bench a player – they are anathema to the true fan.

“Don’t call yourself a Jays fan if your already bitching about them losing today,” reads one tweet from Sveinson’s tweet pool.

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“I want to love all #BlueJays fans… but I have got the most obnoxious, ignorant lady sitting behind me,” reads another. And another:

“Stupid fans why do you touch the ball when it’s in play?”

One more:

“Here fans go with that stupid wave again…they must be bored.”

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Sveinson argues that despite their veneer of positivity, those who believe themselves to be the purest form of fan can have the most divisive, destructive effect on fan culture. It seems a case of noble intentions gone astray. The people trying their hardest to be supportive of their team end up forging a culture of grouches.