The world of hockey twitter and changing social media community landscapes

Growing the game - A brief look into the world of hockey twitter and changing social media community landscapes

Text Linnea Sirén – Illustrations Isabel Schmutzler

Year-and-a-half ago I ended up in an unexpected place. I had very surprisingly grown fond of hockey after the IIHF World Championships of 2021 and discovering Carolina Hurricanes forward (hyökkääjä) Sebastian Aho (he didn’t play in the tournament; long story for another time). To stay informed about his team while also sparing my friends I set up a new Twitter-account only for hockey stuff right before the 2021-22 NHL season started in October. Little did I know what I was getting into when a fancam of Hurricanes’ Crezh forward Martin Nečas to “That’s My Girl” by Fifth Harmony appeared on my timeline and I clicked on it wondering what on earth I was watching. ‘Hockey twitter’ (HT from now on) is a loosely defined and yet distinctive community on Twitter, connected through a shared interest in – you’ll never guess – hockey. By ‘loosely defined’ I mean that there are no barriers for anyone to see the content shared on HT; by ‘yet distinctive’ I mean that even without following every single person tweeting about the topic the same posts tend to reach the same people. As in any Twitter discussions the information is repeated and reshaped through individuals’ reactions to them, and through both drama and shared excitement a sense of community is created. HT is not unique in the sense that Twitter and other social media’ algorithms tend to create a feeling of private spaces even within worldwide social media platforms around certain groups – the more you interact with certain kinds of content and profiles, the more they are pushed to you. I’ve tried to explain ‘why hockey’ to friends, family and strangers more times than I can count. As a queer feminist people don’t seem to expect you to spend your time on watching men on knives bumping into each other. Things a lot of people seem to associate with hockey – and I did very much too before becoming a fan – are 1) homophobia and toxic masculinity – hockey has been violent, “manly man” sport, and the special status players get is undeniable at least in Finland; 2) sexism – strongly connected to the previous point, hockey is still considered heavily male sport; 3) nationalism – hockey in many ways works as the final arena of “acceptable” nationalism or at least national romanticism and pride, and the success of the national hockey team is conceptualized as success “of the people’’ in Finland, and 4) whiteness. There’s no denying these problems prevail in hockey culture. Hockey is, however, also changing; it’s slow, frustrating, non-linear and often aggravating, but it is changing. The game itself is much less violent than only a decade ago; the new stars of the sport are small, fast and skilled. It’s still physical, fast paced, and fun; in many ways the perfect sport for our increasingly small windows of concentration. Over the past few years NHL has started a number of iniatives from league-wide Pridenights to Black History Month celebrations amongst other things, and #HockeyIsForEveryone has been an ongoing project for many seasons now in an attempt to make the sport more inclusive. These are gestures towards better, and hopefully they will develop from being performances into actual change. At the same time there’s no denying that NHL is hopelessly behind compared to other sport leagues, even, and has a huge problem with unaccountibility for enabling a culture that protects a place for sexisism, homophobia and racism as institutional problems in the league along with some players convicted for such harassement before. And yet the part of HT that I stumbled upon was largely queer or ally, female and endlessly passionate about the sport that doesn’t often seem to like you back. How can one coexist in this context, when so much of it seems to be against you? Alone I probably couldn’t and wouldn’t, but social media has allowed me to meet people who share more than just my interest in the sport, but also many other aspects of my identity as well as the values I hold dear. This creates a space for discussing the aforementioned problems, holding the league accountable and demanding change in both the inequality enabling institutions as well as the fan culture around it. It is not easy – every time these controversies arise it disappoints just the same, and makes one wonder if the true change will ever come, but the community in Twitter is nevertheless creating that space for change. In November I conducted a survey for this article about hockey, gender and HT to see how people conceptionalize and interact with the community. I received just shy of 100 responses in two days after sharing it on Twitter. This is my attempt at analyzing those results to find trends on attitudes between different intersections of hockey fans through Twitter to give us a deeper look into HT.

What makes a community?

The survey was divided into three parts: first the determining of respondents’ relationship with hockey, second their experiences of hockey twitter, and finally their thoughts about Finland – a very interesting topic, not the least because most of the North American respondents had never even heard of Finland before coming across Finnish NHL-players. Unfortunately due the limitation of space I’ve decided to drop the Finland part from this analysis in favor of exploring the community side of the survey, but hopefully bring it into discussion in further works.

Most of the surveytakers were between the groups of 16-20 (27,8%) and 21-25 (24,7%), but there were responses from people in all age groups from under 15 to over 16 yearolds. 71 one of the surveytakers identified as ‘female’, 6 of whom specified being cis-women; 15 identified as male, one specifiying he was trans; 9 people identifed as nonbinary, one as genderfluid and one as bigender. A bit under half reported to be currently identifying as straight (45 out of 97 responses). Two repondants declined to answer, and the other half (50 respondents) identified their sexuality from somewhere in the LGBTQ+ community; most of these (27) were bisexual, the rest identifying as different variations and specifications of lesbian, gay, pansexual, asexual, queer, toric or non-labelled non-straights. Majority of the repondants were from the USA, with an emphasis on people from the states of North Carolina and Texas – the reason for this is that two of my favorite teams come from these states, and many of the people this survey reached are my followers or the followers of my followers. Other respondents came from Belgium, Canada, Crezhia, Finland, Germany, Italy, Mexico, Singapore, Slovakia, South-Korea, Spain, Switzerland and UK (Scotland, Wales, and 3 unspecified). The question about ethnicity was understood so differently between the respondents that it is not sensible to group those together here in more detail than stating that the majority of responders were white but there were also mixed, black, indigenous and Asian representation from different nationalities. All except one respondent said that they follow NHL, but another 28 leagues were also mentioned, from all different levels around North America and Europe (For example Swiss, German, UK, Swedish, Finnish, Slovak, Crezh leagues), covering both women’s and men’s hockey. All 32 NHL teams were named amongst the favorites between these 100 with an emphasis on Carolina Hurricanes and Dallas Stars (for reasons explained before) as well as many different teams from the aforementioned leagues. Unsurprisingly, age, gender or sexuality didn’t affect the things respondants liked about the game of hockey itself. Most common answer was the fast pace and quickly changing situations – someone noted very interestingly that hockey is the perfect sport for the TikTok-age where people’s ability to focus is constantly tested. Another point that arose from the answers a lot was the skillfullness of the players. Hockey is a very holistic sport in the sense that you have to be fast, smart and detail-oriented, have both explosive speed but also endurance for the full hour a game lasts, strong but not enough so to slow you down – all while balancing on skates. One answer summarized it well: “I love how fast and confusing it is. The other major North American sports (baseball, American football, and basketball) are all very regimented. Certain situations happen again and again and teams and players know how to deal with them. - - I never feel the need to be distracted by something else watching hockey. Things can change in a split second. Both sports scratch different parts of my brain, for lack of a better phrase, but the speed and randomness of hockey has always intrigued me.” The problems people find in NHL institutions as well as the hockey (fan) culture were the same across the board. Sexism, homophobia and racism were the most common answers not dependent on the gender, sexuality or age of the respondant. Young men felt like hockey had a problem of being “old white guys club” for the same reasons as young women, but older men also agreed with the same issues with both the sport and the culture, including the past glorification of violence. When asked if they had ever considered stopping following hockey women and people with queer identities were however more likely to answer yes. The acknowledgement for the problems seems to then be widely accepted, but the people suffering the consequnces of the current system understandably were more tired of dealing with it. Especially people with experiences of their own of sexual harassement had often already given up on hockey momentarily as controversies related to those experiences had been exposed. When asked if she had considered stopping following hockey, a woman in her early 20s wrote “Unfortunately, more times than I care to admit. Honestly, it seems like I hate hockey more than I like it most times. - - I think that it can’t get worse, but hockey proves again and again that I can, and will. So yes, I have considered it. I have eased my obsession with this sport. I’m watching and interacting less. - - It’s hard, I mean this sport has been my life, practically my entire personality, but I’ve come to realize that in a lot of cases lately, for my mental health, it has been doing me more harm than good.” Women and gender miniorities were more likely to have an experience about being belittled as fans based on their gender identity; not a single man reported this experience. When asked if they considered HT a community, the answers varied the most. Again, these responses can’t be cathegorized based on any specific indicators such as age or gender. Most agreed that there was a sense of community, but many also pointed out that it was divided into so many subgroups that it could hardly be called a community as a whole. Some agreed there was a community but they weren’t a part of it; some were critical and denied a sense of community, or said it was a community only though being overy critical towards the league and the culture around it. Some younger responders, familiar with these kinds of Twitter fandoms, felt like there was a community, but that it was much more loosely knit than other Twitter fandoms they were a part of. There was also a clear divide between people who found the community to be mostly a source of (insider) information and others who enjoyed the interactive aspects of it more. A woman under the age of 20 pointed out “I think there is a difference between hockey fans on twitter and “hockeytwt”, which I feel like is a group of hockey fans that dont really reflect the stereotypical dynamic—generally younger, gender-diverse, queer, etc“. Another person identifying as nonbinary in the same age group wrote that “To me, it’s just a bunch of people with a shared love for the sport coming together to share their thoughts and ideas”. 60+ year old woman said that she was just thankful for the knowledge she was gaining and ‘cool people’ she had met;

then again a teenaged girl felt that “There is no sense of community, its just constant snarky behavior that brings others down if they share a love for the sport or player.” This illustrates the different approaches to the same flow of content in social media, unexplainable by gender or age differences. It seems then that rather than age or gender, engagement and meaningful connections made create the sense of community. How those connections are made seems to be more a question of ability to interact with people – which, again, might not be a strictly question of the most basic intersections that social media can quite easily fade out at first glance (age/gender/ sexuality/ethnicity/disability/etc) but rather a question of (and more importantly expression of) political views or social anxiety, for example, that influences person’s ability to reach out to others even under a username. A nonbinary person in their 30s responded the question about community with “To me, hockey twitter skews towards the nontraditional fan - women, trans and nonbinary people, people who aren’t straight, etc., although that could just be the people I follow. That makes it an enjoyable experience for me. I enjoy the fancams and stuff like that, but I don’t really interact with anyone because I’m scared.” Being part of the LGBTQ+ community in itself doesn’t make it easier to feel included in the community, but perhaps social media allows you more room to make that decision yourself instead of being pushed aside reflexively. Many agreed that social media made it easier to navigate amongst the fans and find your own place in it. A woman in her 30s wrote that “When I started following hockey, my best friend told me to find the team’s Twitter fans/community, because I would get to know other fans and learn a lot about the game, and she was absolutely right. I’ve found a huge network of fans that I now consider friends, even though I’ve never actually met most of them.” A girl in her late teens commented that “I think this is a place where you can interact with fans of hockey while also feeling safe doing it. I think the safety is big for black fans, LGBTQ+ fans, and female fans because men can be scary especially in this sport so for them to have a place to talk about hockey where they can choose not to interact with those kinds of people by blocking them or muting them or simply not to replying to them it’s very important. - - It also just grows my love for the sport because you see all this content and it’s really cool.“ These responses reflect the many benefits of a ‘community’; the information, friendships, new forms of content and transformational potential for minorities to feel more included. The transformational potential in the community was experienced and promoted by many. A man in his late 20s wrote that the meaning of the community was to “root for the sport & grow it” and that it “should be welcoming to people”. A woman in her late 20s noted that she already felt safer going to the games after making friends through Twitter that she could go with. Another woman in her 30s wrote that “HT community is really the only reason I stay involved in hockey at all. The friends

I’ve made here are so important to me.” Yet another woman in her 20s commented that “It makes me feel not as alone with my frustrations with the sport. But it also gave me a totaly new appreciation for community, how well and easily you can strive toward a common goal and how supportive people can be.” A common experience amongst minority identities was feeling seen and validated through HT beyond the future wish for more inclusive culture. When asked whether the respondent had made friends, over 60% answered yes, and another 6% responded that they hadn’t but hoped to. A common answer read as this example: “Of course! A girl I consider one of my best friends, I met on HT by being huge fans of Sebastian Aho.” A good summary of all of these answers might be this one: “There’s definitely a community, and it’s wonderful, though chaotic.” A man in his late 20s felt like he didn’t necessarily wasn’t a part of the community but said that “I know your community has been an important foundation of strength to many people”, but also that to an outsider it seemed there’s always a fight going on. The conceptualization of HT remains vague, but both agreements and disagreements of its meaning suggest that something distinctive is formed under it.

The fading value of ‘local’

Moving on from the formation of the community to contextualizing this change in hockey fan demographics, we must look at the ways in which people became fans, what gets them intrigued and what keeps them coming back. Many respondents had an experience of making friends despite not having met in person even after years of friendship due to distances – social media, it seems, has not only changed the meaning of location between fans and the team, but also between fans. Let’s try to make sense of that shift, and situate it in the wider context of social media communities. There were two clear trends of getting exposed to HT, depending on how long the respondent had been following the sport. Many had grown up with hockey and became more interested gradually and eventually joined Twitter, and some had found the sport initially through social media videos, such as highlight reels, fancams or funny compilations. Playoff success also contributed to when people got into teams, both for local fans (going to games is more fun when your team is doing well) and international ones (NHL promotes the content more, and the games are of very high quality as the best teams of the league match-up). COVID was a commonly mentioned factor in many newer fans’ journey to finding hockey as boredom led them to hockey related media on Youtube, Tumblr, Twitter or on TV during the playoffs in the “bubble” in the fall of 2020 when not much else was happening in the sports world, or through reading romance novels or fanfiction of other fandoms that were based around hockey, for example. The team being close-by alone doesn’t determine being a fan anymore like it perhaps has in the past. You can watch games remotely and interact with other fans from all over the world, and many fans even have multiple favorite teams. Many of the respondents did cheer for their local team, some didn’t due to a complicated relationship with their hometowns; some cheered for their childhood local team instead of the current one for nostalgic reasons. For some it was a matter of playstyle that had made them interested in specific teams; for some it was completely random, just the first team they’d come across. Welcoming fanbase and active social media engagement of the team’s Twitter had interested some of the respondents, and many had also become interested through a documentary on Toronto Maple Leafs produced by Amazon Prime – this to me clearly reflects the rising interest in player personalities and availability of content on them as an important new gateway to hockey. Some mentioned following their favorite player when they were traded, and a number of people also said their reason was being interested in Finnish culture and as a result, having looked for a so-called “Finnish” NHL team, where there are many Finnish players in key-positions. A pretty good summary of the different ways in which one would become invested in different teams was in this answer: “Dallas is my local team; for Carolina it’s honestly all about Aho for me, I truly believe he’s the perfect player, the total package, plus he’s just adorable; for Washington it started with the 17-18 Cup run.” Being able to watch games remotely is a rather new development that has grown the game, and the ability to connect with local fans and media despite physical distance is a huge part of why HT has been born. A woman in her forties said that “To me, hockey twitter is the athletes, coaches, journalists, activists, and fans trying to make positive changes in hockey culture”. Being able to interact with these insider insights despite living on the other side of the world creates a feeling of true possibility of change, because the league in many ways feels very reachable. On the other hand a man in his early 20s noted that despite his team being his local one his favorite thing was watching games “together” remotely by live-tweeting through them, a quite basic function of HT. This possibility erases some obstacles of inqlusivity not only for people who are experiencing the games from far away, but also local people who can’t afford the high NHL prices or the travel expenses. Economic factors were one of the biggest issues people brought up when there were open ended questions – it is still considered very much an elite sport, but the new ways of engaging with it seem to help at least a little bit. Locality and transnationality, then, don’t mean fixed things to all fans in this context. Being able to physically attend the games is a small part of the whole experience.

“The team being close-by alone doesn’t determine being a fan anymore like it perhaps has in the past.”

As we can see, social media has played a big part in bringing new people to hockey. This change has been promoted by new forms of content, created both by official team and league actors, but also largely, and increasingly, by the fanbase itself. The players create interest by performing well and creating success for their teams, which the local fans help through being physically present to cheer for them; the teams promote these players by producing interviews and funny clips to show the team personality outside of the ice too; NHL shares these and creates content between teams, bringing together personalities from different teams to make more people interested. Fans operate between all of these levels as they actively take part in creating analytics, discussing controversies, translating interviews (NHL has done a poor job at reacting to many of its star players these days being European and not speaking English as their first language – question about whether fans would like to see more content of the players speaking in their native languages was met with overwhelmingly enthusiast support for the idea), fancams, fanart, memes – any intertextual, creative ways to turn viral trends outside of hockey context into shared jokes for this specific community. How did this happen? Social media, it seems, allows new kinds of interactions with the subject of interest while also emphasizing the experience of being a fan as a social phenomenon not only between the immediate group of fans but also other fandoms in same platforms, whether they gather around a tv-show, band, greek mythology or math. These communities develop their own lingo and inside jokes but also loan influences from other fandoms. In the case of hockey, for example, the influence of the popularization of Kpop (Korean pop) is very present in the development of fandom practices across the board. It might sound far-fetched, but once you start connecting the dots the more sense it starts to make why the rise of HT has happened right when it has. Let’s take a closer look into that. The global popularization of Kpop has normalized the object of admiration being physically far away to the point where the remote fan engagement through social media is more significant to one’s status as a fan than attending concerts, for example. The main dynamic of a fan and the object of fandom is the same in hockey and Kpop: people are usually fans of a group (team/ band) first, but they have their favorites from within (this would be called ‘bias’ in Kpop slang). In both cases the ‘group’ in question are men roughly between the ages of 18-30, using their bodies as their main instruments. Everyone has a ‘position’, which hilariously are even at times called the same: kpop groups have a center and wingers (in reference to the formation of dances), just like with ice hockey forward lines (keskushyökkääjä/sentteri = center, vasen/oikea-laitahyökkääjä = left/right winger). In the case of Finland the success of Finnish players has had the same kind of effects as Kpop’s popularity – most of the respondents had become interested in Finnish culture more broadly as well, and many had started learning the language through Duolingo. Many new forms of fan-content, such as fancams are from Kpop fans – initially they meant videos focused on a certain member of a group dancing, but it has developed to mean a video edit lasting 10 seconds to 2 minutes of clips of any idol to popular music. Kpop idols are often controlled in their outings, just like hockey players have not been expected to show a lot of personality (this is also changing, like noted before) which allows a lot of the narratives and ideas of these idols to be left for imagination, making them seem more approachable and ‘aquirable’ than old-school celebrities with big personalities. I could go on, but I think the point comes across: social media doesn’t only expose us to new content, but makes jumping from one fandom to another quite easy as the basic structures remain the same. This brings completely new people to the communities, which in the case of traditionally white and male hockey is in itself changing the scene. One of the most interesting forms of new fandom culture is the focus on ‘narratives’ that are very much based on the tension between what a player shows of his personality and what is left for imagination - one of the most interesting things Kpop has bought to the new fandom cultures. ‘Narrative’ in this context means basically the “storyline” of a career. Good examples of this are Sebastian Aho and Teuvo Teräväinen. Both arrived to Hurricanes at the same time in the fall of 2016, Aho as a rookie for his first NHL-season whereas Teräväinen was traded for basically free from Chicago where he had won the Stanley Cup just the year before. Aho was a huge potential but still in the making, full of drive to prove himself; Teräväinen, three years older at 22, looked like his best years were behind him after being traded from a then Stanley Cup-dynasty to a struggling small-market team. These two underdogs became best friends, and eventually turned into a record breaking duo partly responsible for Carolina’s recent success. People are invested in their narrative(s), because the perfect movie ending to it would be winning the Stanley Cup together – or be tragically separated when both of their contracts come to an end in the spring of 2024. This is obviously an interpretation, not the same for everyone, but it is precisely the everchanging, personally constructed narrative of them that interests people on top of their talent as players. That drama and drive is a great source of inspiration for fancams, highlights, funny moments -compilations and so on. At the same time the fans can feel like they are almost co-living the experience as they can follow it closely in real-time from all over the world, like an interactive never-ending TV-show. There are a lot of players, duos and even whole teams like this in the league, and I argue the fan creativity around these narratives is a huge reason for the growth of the sports popularity.

“Social media doesn’t only expose us to new content, but makes jumping from one fandom to another quite easy as the basic structures remain the same.”

There was not a significant difference in the levels of interacting with fan content depending on whether the team was the respondent’s local team or not. Fans who weren’t local and were young female/non-binary, however, were more likely to create this content, such as fancams or highlight clips etc. Enjoyment of these kinds of content wasn’t exclusive to those categories. A man in his 50s made a sweet comment about his favorite thing about HT being learning new perspectives and being exposed to fancams among other things that have also given something new to his experience as a fan. A woman in her 50s commented that “... There are regular “memes”, and people who have certain ‘roles’, our own references, terminology, etc. Like a community pub or something. Best thing is meeting people I wouldn’t normally interact with (b/c of age, gender, hometown) and learning about their experience, pov. So many unlikely people are so funny, creative, but would never be able to get attention if we were all in a room watching the game.” These new ways of being a fan in social media are not exclusive, closed communities, then, but rather bringing something new for the fans who’ve been there all along. It’s in this interaction and exchange that the true potential of the fan culture more broadly lies. Then again it isn’t always so serious: a teenaged boy wrote “.. We [with his best friend] can go in depth about how a player is doing in their game or we can just be silly. Lots of calling players meow meows on the side of twitter I’m on. Me and my friends have private accounts where we just mess around with stuff like that, although some people do that publicly. Its just fun.” A woman in her late 20s thought along the same lines: “Hockey twitter community provides the entertainment and interest that teams lack. If something good or bad happens hockey twitter is the place to go.” The meaning and purpose of HT is different for everyone, but that’s exactly the point – it is creating room for everyone through interacting between different kinds of fans of the sport while also inviting new voices to the discussion through the new infrastructures of social media based fandoms.

Final thoughts

Well summarizing the changing functions and formations of being a fan of hockey, a woman in her late 20s wrote “But in terms of what the community is and what it means, I think it’s mostly a creative outlet for earnest enthusiasm? Like, I love the fancams. I love the threads dissecting post-game interviews and how they fit into The Narrative. I love the translations you do. It feels like people are out here either creating something tangible (fancams, subtitled videos) or collectively creating stories.” The community, beyond being a transformative space, also expands by bouncing their creativity from each other, and then sharing it into the community where it gets a life of its own.

(On the right; yours truly having a proud classic fangirl meltdown moments after Sebastian Aho skated over to give me one of the pucks they used in the warm-ups.) I’ve attempted to break down some of the key findings from the survey I did regarding HT and the changes in hockey culture, but also more broadly the changing landscape of social media communities and what it means to be a fan in this era. I have attempted to illustrate some of the ways in which HT is a product of these times just like other fandoms on social medias, but also how it creates alternative possibilties specifically for fans previously left outside of hockey culture. This is nothing but a scratch of the surface, and even from this survey I had to leave many interesting points out. I am interested in studying HT more in the future as I believe anthropological approach would offer a great way to theorize this phenomenon further. NHL keeps executives continue to talk about wanting to “grow the game” without realizing it’s already happening without them realizing what potential lies in this alternative space. HT is a strange, wonderful community. It can be awful to navigate between the prevailing systematic issues in NHL and hockey culture in general, but at the same time the community around it is endlessly funny, supportive and creative. Finding a group of people who you can openly share your excitement over silly things, after all, is one of the greatest joys life can offer. V Special thanks to Elena Halinen for proof-reading and helping me edit this article, and for Isabel Schmutzler (another dear friend made through HT) for the original artwork. See more of her work at https://isabelschmutzler.com.