The crow Lukas Ebenbichler examines the hold of social media over professional skiing. A recurring question that no one dares dig too deep into with the risk of having to inspect their own stone before casting it into the digital abyss.
For me skiing is a way to express myself and a way to escape all the daily stress and routine. Skiing should be an opportunity to get close to nature, to explore your surroundings. But in fact, it is not only about skiing anymore. It is about how you act on Instagram or Facebook or Twitter.
Nowadays, skiers are just defined by how many followers they have or how many likes they get on a post within a couple of minutes. The more likes and followers you have, the more attractive you are for potential supporters. That stresses me out because I am also trying to get more and more. Is that the right way to present yourself?
Back in the days people got skis and stuff because they were freakin` good skiers, friendly, always up on the mountain presenting the products.. You were sponsored because you were good not because you had thousands of followers on Instagram and can work with Photoshop and so on.
Sure, social media is part of the game, if you want to continue with your passion you have to interact in some ways. It is totally cool to post pics of your daily adventures or to do some Stories, but it is not OK to be defined by your followers, likes and so on.
Skiers today are more or less bloggers: we blog about our adventures, we show how great everything is even though it is not, we annoy buddies to take a picture for our feed or our sponsors, we buy camera gear to produce mind-blowing clips or pics just to have an awesome feed and content sponsors can use mainly for free. Is that correct?
Do we put hours and hours into that to just to get free stuff? How should we make our living out of it? How should we get benefits out of it?
In fact, we forgot the reason why we are skiing, why we are out there in the mountains, why we explore our backyard: because we freakin` love it, because we are good at it, because we cannot imagine anything better. People who are feeling like that and living like that are way more precious than people with thousands and thousands of followers on Instagram because they just take that one who pays the most and don’t even stand behind the product. People who are out there and love it to the fullest are a huge support for every company because they are going to bring in input to help the company to get better and better.
We are not out there because of social media we are out there because we love it. And no one involved in that game is able to say: I am different, I do not act like that. We ALL are in that game.
