Your Opinion....Do Wrestling Fans Have Shorter Attention Spans....

[Papa Shaun]

These Days Than in Years Past???

Reason I'm asking.....I'm probably a little older than most Sherdog posters on here (36), and it just seems like the fans today tend to get tired of a feud or booked title run must faster that what most once did, especially in the WWE these days.........

Some cases in point: ++Just 6 months ago....everyone was eating up Goldberg returning on Raw/the Brock feud, by Wrestlemania.....ready for Goldberg to leave for good.

++Roman Reigns went from being voted what, 2014 Superstar of the Year by fans, to fans asking for him to be released and sent to TNA by mid 2015.

++Smackdown/RAW have just been split as separate rosters/shows for a little less than 1 year now, and they're already wanting to split all the rosters up.

++Has anyone actually held a singles title for longer than 6 months in recent years....that wasn't relinquished by injury??

Don't know if it's the social media/electronic age.....but I really don't see the new up and comers being able to last more than what, 5-6 years at a time on the main roster before they're spit out in the future. Kind of hard to believe now that some guys were able to use/run the same gimmicks/move sets/look for decades at a time, while I'll look for most now to be retried out by the time they're 35.

 

[GSPSAKU]

It's not just wrestling fans but this newer generation. It's this social media/electronic age. A decade ago, the TL;DR was RARELY used unless it was like a 1000 word write up but now it's expected if a post is as long as yours. Look at videos, the videos that are popular now are 6 second vines and 10 second snaps or 140 characters.

With that said, if built up properly, I believe a long term feud would still be exceptional but it has to be done right. If you really look back at wrestling history, the hotshotting didn't really come from the fans but rather the wrestling companies themselves. WCW and WWE in 1998 started the trend because it was all about rating so instead of long, complex, and drawn out storylines, they were changed on the fly sometimes on the day of the show as a means to try and one up the other company. It's like sex, once you have it, it's near impossible (if not impossible) to go back to life without it and that's wrestling; the Monday Night Wars really pushed the envelope and this hotshotting really picked up steam and now it's hard for the WWE and the fans to go back to longer story lines.

 

[deezy]

People were pissed off at Pepsi for a stupid ad a few days ago.....Now they're onto something else.

 

[Sanshou Kid]

Like @GSPSAKU said, it isn't just wrestling fans, it is people as a whole.

I will say though, I think the oversaturation of the market with wrestling has gone a long way towards the shorter attention span. No longer need we wait a week, or even a day really to see more wrestling, or advancements in the storyline.

Can you imagine if they tried to do "The Mega Powers explode" type year long storyline nowadays, with Twitter, Facebook, however many hours of wrestling a week, all that jazz?

 

[SocraticMethod]

Like @GSPSAKU said, it isn't just wrestling fans, it is people as a whole.

I will say though, I think the oversaturation of the market with wrestling has gone a long way towards the shorter attention span. No longer need we wait a week, or even a day really to see more wrestling, or advancements in the storyline.

Can you imagine if they tried to do "The Mega Powers explode" type year long storyline nowadays, with Twitter, Facebook, however many hours of wrestling a week, all that jazz?

Exactly. It's also the nature of wrestling today. I'm 37. When we were kids you could build a program for six months because there was like one pay per view and maybe a couple SNME's in that time period where the stars actually interacted with each other on TV rather than just squashing jobbers. Now the top guys are all wrestling each other every week on Raw or SD with a PPV every month on top of that. Rather than the entire year pretty much building to WM like when we were kids, now it's like at most they build to one of the big four, and even then you'll have programs that don't even last that long.

It's easy to say young people today have shorter attention spans, and I'm sure it's true to a degree, but they're conditioned to by the world they live in. My 5-year-old has just gotten into wrestling in the past year. He will never know a time when he couldn't ask me to put on any WWE match ever at any time. I either watched one of the VHS tapes I made from a prior SNME or WM, or I waited till the next week.

 

[Blackjack]

Fans of wrestling from the 70s and 80s when it was treated as a sport wouldn't watch what they call "sports entertainment" today, so it's a moot point. Back then, like in Georgia Championship Wrestling, they'd come to a town weekly for 3 months with the same angle. Nobody working today would be able to pull off running a 3 month angle weekly and keep the attendance levels at a high level. Unfortunately most people that would be able to teach the kids these days how to do that or either dead or dying.

 

[Smigg]

Absolutely they do.

I remember when the heels laying out a babyface made fans think "I'm gonna tune in next week to see how he retaliates!", now it's "This is bullshit! They're burying him! That's it, I'm not watching anymore, they don't care about fans!!"

 

[punkmother]

Absolutely they do.

I remember when the heels laying out a babyface made fans think "I'm gonna tune in next week to see how he retaliates!", now it's "This is bullshit! They're burying him! That's it, I'm not watching anymore, they don't care about fans!!"

i'm not certain that has as much to do with attention span as it does the death of kayfabe. with all the easily accessible podcasts, shoot interviews, twitter, etc. even take the mauro thing, fans get to follow the politics real time, and if something happens to one of their favorites they now get to peek behind the curtain a bit and speculate.

in the past, you could pay 4 bucks a minute for more kayfable bullshit from okerlund or you could just take it at face value and move on.

 

[deezy]

Biggest story this week won't mean nothing next week.