Venture Geek

My friend Pete (co-founder of the new sports social media site Yardbarker) pointed me to an article about the NCAA’s take on student athlete blogging. This quote from the article will give you a flavor:

…a few dirty words won’t land a school in trouble with the NCAA. Unfortunately for compliance officials…the Internet offers plenty of other avenues for potential violations. And college sports’ governing body doesn’t seem interested in relaxing its rules to accommodate the technology boom…Meanwhile, more electronic methods to run afoul of the NCAA are being invented every day. Unfortunately,…the grown-ups in charge are typically among the last to know.
(my emphasis added)

While some of what’s happening here is a simple case of gray areas in the rules of the NCAA — like the rules governing the types of overtures a school can make towards athletes — a lot of this, from my perspective, boils down to top-down institutions realizing the new nature of bottom-up media and basically freaking out about it. For instance, suddenly the plausible deniability about underage drinking on college sports teams is tougher and tougher to pull off when kids are posting pictures of themselves and others doing keg stands (one of the examples from the article). Student athletes being recruited to these schools are interacting directly with the student bodies at those schools and sharing what that experience is like in a very public way. Old people have been freaked out by the culture of young people for a very long time — certainly in the modern era back to the dawn of Rock’n'Roll (hard to remember that a mere generation ago it was downright unacceptable for Elvis to shake his hips on television).

I’m helping a friend of mine put together an academic article on peer publishing as an emergent social movement — the basic premise being that the advent of peer publishing has dramatic impacts on the way people relate to the media (more on this in a future post). This article about the NCAA is, in many ways, right at the heart of that premise. What used to be tightly controlled now is not tightly controlled. What used to be unexposed is now exposed. I love it when people claim that MySpace and Facebook are the cause of teenage “problems” — the lifestyle of teens is now right out in the open for anyone to see (assuming they have the ability to do a search on the Internet for what their own kids are doing — a skill that, based on recent media reports, I should not assume parents have), and that scares the shit out of many adults. It does mean that kids growing up today will need to learn new ways to be media savvy. No longer is media literacy just about understanding how commercial mainstream media is trying to manipulate you — today you must learn how the broader communities interact with each other and what the implications of disclosure may be in and outside your immediate community. The first MySpace generation will continue to generate stories about the long-term consequences of full disclosure of socially (in the “adult world”) unsavory parts of their lives. But, before long that same generation will be making the hiring decisions — do you think they will still care that they can Google someone and find pictures of them having too much fun? I suppose time will tell.