Thursday, September 27, 2012

Twitter Personality vs Reality: Chris Bosh



Christopher Bosh, the power forward and possibly the future center for the Miami Heat, is one of NBA's biggest stars (ESPN). With the invention of Twitter many athletes, including Bosh, have taken to Twitter to give people more insight into their lives beyond the news and interviews they appear on. Having Twitter as their outlet can be very beneficial to them since they can quickly address any misunderstandings that arise from news reports and interviews. While perusing Bosh's Twitter, I noticed that there is a strong disconnect between what he tweets and the type of news stories that are covered about him.

Immediately after reading many of Chris Bosh’s tweets, I noticed that he did not talk much about his job as a basketball player. Although the season is over, there have been numerous stories produced about him especially focusing on the unconfirmed switch from him playing power forward to occupying the center position in the upcoming season. Bosh’s tweets during the season tell the same story of nonexistent tweets that refer to his job as a basketball player, even during the time he strained an abdominal muscle and was unable to play in some games (The Huffington Post). However, Bosh did take the time to type one tweet in regard to his team winning the NBA championship, and he managed to retweet a few of his teammates who took pictures of him while at practice.

Tweets during the time of his injury.

Besides his professional basketball life, Bosh tweets little about his personal life. He has posted a few pictures of his son and mentions his family in passing, but he doesn't provide more insight into his family life. In the news, there have been several scathing reports in relation to his involvement in a child support dispute. Although the woman who is contesting the child support is providing this unfavorable information, Bosh did not use Twitter to address her statements (AOL). Instead, he uses Twitter to posts many pictures of himself on vacation or of him making several appearances on the sets of television shows or other events. This was peculiar since his family accompanies him on many of his vacations, and his wife tweets photos of the entire family while on vacation with him.
Bosh's twitpics versus his wife's.


As the self-proclaimed coolest dude alive – this is according to his Twitter – he doesn't communicate regularly with his fans. With over 800,000 followers his mentions may be too much for him to handle, but that’s not a good explanation if a celebrity like Lady Gaga can find time to interact with her followers. Despite the fact that he does not engage actively with his fans, he does regularly mention LeBron James and Dwyane Wade in his tweets. This was virtually the only similarity between his tweets and the stories news organizations posted about him. Many of the news stories treated James, Wade, and Bosh as a unit. While researching, there were several instances were writers casually inserted Bosh’s name in non-sport related articles about James and Wade, simply because he is their teammate.