March Madness is a spectacle built and fueled by our digital revolution

[Rob L 3,811]

And Go Zags

March Madness almost perfectly captures how I sift, choose, digest, discuss, share and enjoy information in the 21st century. Like millions, that means I’ll enjoy the next three weeks as much as any in the sports year. The intergalactic distance between my experience of the NCAA basketball tournament just a dozen years ago and my all-source saturation now is the perfect match of a 67-game mega-event with the tastes and new tools of this age. They were meant for each other.

But I also wonder how much this college hoops binge tells us about how we sift, select and share every other kind of data in this instantaneous customized age — including the information we choose to consume or ignore on subjects far tougher and more vital than games. That’s a question with no answer. But I know that how I interact with sports increasingly resembles how I interact with all information.

Tom Boswell is a Washington Post sports columnist. View Archive

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[The perfect NCAA bracket]

In sports, that usually means more readily available knowledge, more freedom of choice and more pleasure. I spend the same amount of time on sports that I always did. But, with March Madness as an example, I now consume several times as many games, learn far more about a wider range of sports and athletes, understand those contests in greater depth and, all in all, have an indecent amount of fun.

This naturally leads to a huge community of people with similar experience — more bang per hour of sports-time invested. That payback breeds a like-minded community, from office pools to social media.

But I sometimes wonder if sports, or entertainment in general, isn’t the message that best suits the mediums these days — with a reinforcing feedback loop of enjoyment-information-more-enjoyment. In how many other areas are we net winners? And where might we find pernicious disinformation loops? It’s hard not to notice that basketball links us at the same time politics drives us more crazy than usual.

The sports boom in this century bears little resemblance to typical business growth. Almost every major sport discovers exploding revenue streams faster than it can monetize them. This cash craze is linked head-to-toe with the digital information revolution.

Consider the sticky honey-sweet web that captures us this week. Starting Thursday, I’ll pick what I want from an NCAA men’s basketball tournament menu that includes almost every game that’s played everywhere at any time — from noon until after midnight. Sometimes, I can watch on multiple devices at once — from a mega-TV (which now costs a fraction what it once did) to a tablet, a desktop computer or a phone in my hand. Then I’ll watch as much or as little of those games as I want and customize it all to my preferred viewing hours. (No, don’t tell me that upset score!)

I’ll flash through commercials, screening out ads that annoy me. I’ll mute announcers I don’t like. I keep track of my bracket picks, razz my son by text or needle friends online about our results. I’ll tweet opinions, or maybe reveal my strategy online before the coach decides his! I can post gloating links to Facebook. Millions of others will use multiple technological servants to send vines, gifs, audio clips — a universe of Madness sociability.

Our March motto: My life, my time, my fun. I’ll watch based on one and only one rule: Am I enjoying myself? A lot. Right now. Otherwise: “Click.”

[Podcast: NCAA tournament preview]

This is the world I always wanted. I just didn’t know it until it arrived. It’s the perfect universe for the part of me that’s a sports fan. I not only eliminate anything that is slow or boring, but I demand almost constant excitement and pleasure or I’ll simply disconnect from the action and come back later to see if the adrenaline level has reached sufficient heights. Results that make me angry or break my bracket are turned off and, thus, recede quickly to the point where they hardly feel like they happened at all.

Let’s also admit that, for a month, selective ethics take hold: Generations of college hoop scandals aren’t mentioned, even though some new abomination will probably arrive within weeks of the nets coming down in Indianapolis.

March Madness also illustrates how sports offers us a feast of expert views, yet also constantly undermines the authority of any one opinion. Within a few days, much of America becomes a 3,000-mile-wide one-inch-deep nation of superficial basketball profundity. How democratic! And, in sports, how harmless that we all get to believe that our quick-study opinions are as good as anybody else’s.

I wish I knew the large implications of an information society that tends toward short attention spans, high passions, intense favoritism and profound study of favorite issues — but with complete ignorance of other subjects outside its circle of comfortable learning. I don’t.

But I know that early-21st-century technology has catalyzed every form of interest in sports. The proof is a country that thinks it might watch — or scan or lucky-dip through — nearly 50 hours of basketball from Thursday through Sunday. Then schedule another 30 hours before the dance ends.

History will discover a thousand lessons in the way the digital age ignited and inspired, disoriented and damaged this new century. But it hit sports like a rocket booster — especially in March. Unless having a very good time for nearly a month is somehow bad, we all get to dance. Start the countdown.