I Tracked Social Media During Games and Found Something Disturbing

I Tracked Social Media Engagement During Games and Found Something Disturbing

I caught myself doing it during the championship game. My team had just scored what could be the winning goal, and instead of watching the replay on the stadium screen or celebrating with the people around me, I was hunched over my phone, frantically crafting the perfect post to capture the moment I’d just half-witnessed. The celebration happened in my peripheral vision while my attention was consumed by finding the right emoji combination and checking if my previous post was getting likes.

That’s when I decided to run an uncomfortable experiment. For an entire month, I tracked every time I reached for my phone during live games—both at venues and watching from home. I documented what triggered each reach, how long I stayed on my device, and most importantly, what I was actually experiencing in those moments when something significant happened on the field.

The results forced me to confront a truth about modern sports fandom that nobody wants to acknowledge: we’re not really watching anymore. We’re performing watching.

The Performance of Fandom Has Replaced the Experience of It

There’s a moment that happens in every game you attend now. Something spectacular occurs—a diving catch, an impossible shot, a game-changing play. And instead of the collective roar that used to define stadium culture, you hear a softer, scattered response. Look around during these peak moments, and you’ll see thousands of people holding up phones, watching the game through a three-inch screen they’re recording on, simultaneously trying to type reactions for social platforms.

This isn’t about technology criticism or generational finger-pointing. This is about recognizing a fundamental shift in how we relate to live sports experiences. The question we need to ask isn’t whether we use our phones during games—we all do. The question is whether we’re watching the game or watching ourselves watch the game.

During my tracking month, I documented something disturbing. On average, I touched my phone within ninety seconds of any significant game moment. Not to check the score or look up a player stat. To share. To post. To perform my reaction before I’d fully processed the actual experience. The urge to broadcast my fandom outweighed the urge to simply experience it.

The Dopamine Competition: Your Device Versus the Game

Here’s what makes this behavioral pattern so insidious: notifications are designed to be more immediately rewarding than the game itself. When you post about a great play and start getting likes and responses within seconds, your brain receives instant gratification. The game, meanwhile, might go through a slow period, a commercial break, or a strategic timeout. Your device offers constant, reliable hits of validation. The game offers uncertainty, tension, and delayed payoffs.

From a pure neurological standpoint, your phone is engineered to win this competition for your attention. Every notification ping triggers a small dopamine release. Every like on your game-day post provides social validation. Every response to your hot take about the referee’s call gives you engagement. The game has to compete with a device that’s been optimized through billions of dollars of research to be as addictive as possible.

I noticed this pattern most clearly during tense moments—when games got close in the final minutes, when the outcome was genuinely uncertain. These are supposedly the moments we watch sports for, the ones that create lasting memories and emotional investment. Yet these were precisely the moments when my urge to check my phone became almost unbearable. Not because I was bored, but because the tension was so high that my brain was seeking relief through the comfortable, controllable world of my social feeds.

The Uncomfortable Truth About Second-Screen Behavior

We tell ourselves stories to justify this behavior. We’re “engaging with the community” or “sharing the experience” or “part of the broader conversation about the game.” These rationalizations contain enough truth to be believable, but they obscure something more fundamental: we’re fragmenting our attention during the very experiences we claim to value most.

Think about the last truly memorable sports moment you witnessed. The play everyone still talks about, the game that defined a season. Now ask yourself honestly: were you fully present for it, or were you already thinking about how to describe it online? Were you experiencing the emotion or performing the emotion you thought you should have?

The rise of second-screen behavior—watching games while simultaneously engaging on social platforms—has been framed as enhanced engagement. Sports leagues and broadcasters treat it as a positive development, a way to deepen fan investment and create community. But what if we’re not deepening engagement? What if we’re fracturing it into something that feels like involvement but lacks the emotional weight of genuine, undivided attention?

During my tracking experiment, I made an additional rule: for certain games, I put my phone away entirely. No posting, no checking scores from other games, no scrolling during commercial breaks. Just watching. The experience was initially uncomfortable—my hand reached for my pocket repeatedly during the first quarter, a phantom limb searching for its device. But something shifted as the game progressed.

What Authentic Engagement Actually Feels Like (And Why It’s Uncomfortable)

Without the option to perform my fandom, I was forced to simply experience it. And here’s what I discovered: authentic engagement with sports is actually less comfortable than performative engagement. When you’re fully present for a tense moment, you feel all of it—the anxiety, the uncertainty, the vulnerability of caring about an outcome you can’t control. When you’re performing your fandom online, you get to manage and curate these emotions, presenting them in digestible, shareable formats that feel more controlled.

Real fandom means sitting with discomfort. It means feeling genuinely anxious when your team is down in the fourth quarter, not rushing to post a joke about it to diffuse your own tension. It means experiencing the full emotional arc of a game—the slow builds, the dead periods, the moments of doubt—rather than seeking constant stimulation through device checking.

This is why younger fans often interact with sports differently than previous generations. It’s not that they care less—it’s that they’ve been raised in an environment where every experience is meant to be captured, shared, and validated through social platforms. The idea of simply experiencing something without broadcasting it feels incomplete, like the experience doesn’t fully count if it isn’t documented and acknowledged by others.

The uncomfortable truth is that genuine emotional investment in sports requires vulnerability that performing fandom doesn’t. When you’re truly invested, you can be genuinely hurt by losses, genuinely elated by victories. When you’re performing fandom, you’re at a safe distance, crafting content about emotions rather than fully feeling them.

The Future of Sports Viewership Might Be More Fragmented Than We Realize

What happens to sports culture when most fans experience games through this fractured, partially-attentive lens? We’re already seeing the consequences in viewership patterns and fan behavior. Younger audiences struggle to watch full games, preferring highlights and clips that can be consumed quickly and shared easily. The idea of dedicating three uninterrupted hours to a single game feels increasingly foreign in a culture built around constant context-switching and multitasking.

Sports leagues are responding by creating more shareable moments, more dramatic presentation, more content designed for social platform consumption. But this creates a feedback loop: as games are designed more for social sharing than sustained attention, fans feel even more justified in treating games as background content while they engage with the social media conversation around them.

Consider what this means for the fundamental appeal of sports. The drama of sports has always come from sustained narrative tension—the slow building of stakes over a season, the emotional investment in outcomes that matter because you’ve paid attention to everything that led to them. But if fans are only partly present for most games, only fully tuning in for highlights and crucial moments, does that sustained tension still exist? Or are we moving toward a model where sports become more like a constant stream of potentially-viral moments rather than coherent narratives?

The Question Nobody Wants to Answer

Here’s the question my tracking experiment forced me to confront: am I actually a fan of my team, or am I a fan of the identity and social positioning that comes from being seen as a fan of my team?

This isn’t meant to be judgmental—it’s a genuine question we all need to ask ourselves. There’s a difference between loving sports and loving the way sports fandom functions in your social world. There’s a difference between being emotionally invested in outcomes and being invested in having takes about outcomes that position you as knowledgeable or funny or properly loyal.

The performance of fandom can be deeply satisfying. It provides community, gives you content to share, creates social bonds with other fans, establishes your identity within social groups. These are real benefits that shouldn’t be dismissed. But they’re different from the emotional experience of actually caring about what happens in a game while it’s happening, without an audience for your reactions.

My tracking experiment revealed that on most days, I was more invested in my performance of fandom than in my actual emotional experience of games. I cared more about crafting clever posts about referee calls than about the calls themselves. I was more focused on whether my game predictions were publicly documented than on actually watching the games unfold. I was, in the most literal sense, not really there.

What Happens When We Reclaim Our Attention

The final week of my experiment involved a simple commitment: watch one game per week with phone completely off and inaccessible. Not on silent in my pocket. Actually off, in another room. Just me and the game, the way fandom worked for decades before smartphones existed.

The first thing I noticed was how long games actually are when you’re fully present for them. Three hours of focused attention on a single event is a significant commitment in modern life. The second thing I noticed was how much emotional range I experienced—genuine frustration at mistakes, authentic elation at great plays, real anxiety during close moments. Not the performed versions of these emotions, but the raw feelings that make sports matter.

The third thing I noticed was what I missed by not posting. I had reactions, insights, jokes that I couldn’t share in the moment. Some of them I forgot by the time the game ended. And that felt like a loss—not of the content itself, but of the validation and engagement that content would have generated. This felt revealing. Was I watching sports for the experience or for the content opportunities?

But the fourth thing I noticed made everything else fade in significance: I actually remembered these games differently. The ones I watched with full attention created clearer memories, stronger emotional imprints, more lasting impressions. The games I watched while performing my fandom on social media blurred together, individual moments standing out while the larger narrative and emotional arc faded.

Where We Go From Here

This isn’t a call to abandon social media or pretend we can return to some imagined golden age of pure, undistracted fandom. That world is gone, and trying to recreate it would mean ignoring the genuine benefits that connected sports fandom provides—the communities it builds, the conversations it enables, the ways it helps isolated fans feel part of something larger.

But we need to be honest about what we’re trading away. Every moment spent performing fandom is a moment not spent experiencing it. Every notification we check during a crucial play is a piece of authentic engagement we’re sacrificing for the comfort of constant stimulation. Every post we craft during game action is attention we’re directing away from the very thing we claim to care about.

The solution isn’t binary—phones or no phones, posting or not posting. The solution is consciousness about what we’re doing and why. Are we reaching for our devices because we have something meaningful to share, or because we’re uncomfortable with the intensity of full presence? Are we posting because we genuinely want to connect with other fans, or because we need validation that we’re watching the “right way” with the “correct” reactions?

The most disturbing thing my tracking experiment revealed wasn’t any single behavior or pattern. It was the recognition that I had stopped choosing how I engaged with sports. The performance had become automatic, unconscious, the default mode of fandom. I wasn’t deciding to check my phone during games—I was just doing it, over and over, fragmenting my attention without awareness or intention.

The Challenge

Try your own version of this experiment. Track your phone usage during the next game you watch. Count how many times you check it. Notice what triggers each check—is it boredom, excitement, uncertainty, the need for validation? Notice how much of the actual game you experience versus how much you experience through the lens of preparing to share it.

Then try one game with your device completely off. Just you and the game, nothing to mediate or fragment the experience. Notice what comes up—the discomfort, the urge to check, the anxiety of not being part of the online conversation. But also notice what else emerges: the clarity of full attention, the deeper emotional engagement, the way memories form differently when you’re fully present.

You might discover, as I did, that you’ve been performing fandom so long you’ve forgotten what authentic engagement actually feels like. You might realize that the version of yourself that posts clever takes during games has become more developed than the version that simply cares about outcomes. You might find that the social validation of performing fandom has become more rewarding than the emotional experience of genuine investment.

Or you might discover that your blend of device usage and game attention works perfectly for you, that you’re consciously choosing how you engage rather than defaulting to patterns designed by platform algorithms. Either discovery is valuable. The point isn’t to judge how you watch sports—it’s to become aware of it, to choose it intentionally rather than falling into it unconsciously.

Because here’s what’s at stake: sports matter because they provide rare moments of genuine emotional investment in uncertain outcomes. They create communities built around shared passion and loyalty. They offer narratives that unfold in real time, creating stakes that can’t be manufactured or controlled. But all of this requires attention—real, sustained, sometimes uncomfortable attention.

If we lose the capacity for that kind of attention, we don’t lose sports themselves. We lose what makes sports matter. We keep the performance, the social positioning, the content creation opportunities. But we sacrifice the core experience—the raw, unmediated emotional investment in outcomes we can’t control, shared with others who care just as irrationally and authentically as we do.

That’s what I found when I tracked my social media engagement during games. Not that I was watching too much or posting too much or caring too much about validation. I found that I had stopped being fully present for the experiences I claimed to value most, and that I had stopped noticing this absence because the performance of presence felt almost as satisfying as presence itself.

The question is: what will you find when you look?