There, I said it. I'm not watching the Super Bowl. Period.
The core reason is because I don't like watching football, or more specifically, I don't like how the whole idea of watching football boils down to investment in a sports team as a source of identity. Fundamentally I feel that it's very hard to get into watching a sport without having also played that sport in the past. Somewhere along the line society got the idea that watching competition is somehow more fun or engrossing than actually engaging in that competitive activity. I don't know why. You might argue that it's a matter of aspiration, that there's a sort of fantasy of actually being able to play at that level that provides the much needed impetus to watch and follow sports. But it's not about that. It's about identity adoption and investment.
The thing is, whenever I see someone talking about sports, it's almost always about the relative power of a particular team they follow, or how they hope they win the next game or what have you. It's not about imagining new strategies or tactics, or discussing what other shockingly amazing things other teams are doing. It's about investing yourself into an identity as a fan of a particular sports team for the purpose of creating or breaking social ties.
Or in other words: People who follow sports adopt their favorite teams as an identity in the same way that people in a particular country adopt a national identity as a sense of pride, or the same way people latch onto their religion as a source of identity. This is why you often see looting or rioting after a particularly emotional sporting event when the fans of a particular team are pissed off. When you invest yourself into a sense of identity that's been taken from a sports team, nation, or religion, any slight against the thing you've invested in is projected upon yourself. When your favorite sports team loses, you feel the same as if you yourself had lost. When your country is attacked, either literally (military or terrorist attacks), or metaphorically (attacks on a particular set of values sterotypically assigned to a particular nation), you feel as if you've been attacked, and that's why politics can get so heated despite the people discussing the issues having little to no actual interest in the end result.
But if that was the extent of my complaints I wouldn't be writing this article. There's a lot of things I don't get that I can still respect at some level because not doing so would just be disagreement for the sake of itself, and really, I'm not against the existence of sports or sporting events.
Okay so the Super Bowl is a fairly big event, and in fact it has typically commanded the lion's share of advertising revenue with very large brands spending enormous amounts of money just to get 30 seconds to say something. And typically with advertising rates being so dramatically high to begin with, advertising agencies would spend more money on better production values and flashier effects to ensure that their clients' dollars weren't being wasted. So as the Super Bowl gained popularity, so did it's advertisements gain in quality and expense.
At some point, however, what was once an interesting quirk of the way that advertising time was spent became an institutionalized thing when people started watching the Super Bowl "for the ads". For the record, I don't like legitimizing consumerist propaganda as a legitimate source of entertainment. While phrases like "I only watch the Super Bowl for the ads" sound like hip, ironic deconstructions of the problems I already mentioned with sporting events, it also implies that the advertisements are a source of entertainment that should be watched on their own, i.e. that the Super Bowl exists as a vehicle to serve advertising rather than the advertising getting in the way of your Super Bowl.
The biggest danger with legitimizing advertising as a source of entertainment is that it makes advertisers jobs' easier. This supposedly hip and ironic deconstruction of the Super Bowl used to be just a joke people made, but now it's a legitimate meme among the advertising community, to the point where you don't actually have to watch the Super Bowl to get the ads anymore. For the last few years, advertisers have been posting their ads on YouTube for rewatching after the game. This year, they decided to start posting the ads days before the game even begun, which just feels wrong.
Fundamentally, advertising isn't supposed to be this easy. People aren't supposed to be seeking out advertising as a positive, enjoyable thing. It's supposed to pop up in front of your face, making you angry or annoyed that you have to close a pop-up, turn on AdBlock, or click the YouTube skip ad button. The typical user interface model for advertising makes them negative experiences: they get in the way of your content. While it does mean that advertising is annoying, that's a good thing that it's annoying. You're supposed to be annoyed by commercial propaganda telling you to buy shit you don't need. But the thing is, advertisers don't want to annoy you. A negative association with a product is always a bad thing in advertising and public relations. That's why most advertising isn't of the pop-upy, interrupt-the-experience format, it's hidden everywhere where you won't notice it.
What "Super Bowl ads" are becoming is a way for advertisers to get you to freely share their advertisements without them having to pay a network to insert them into another program. And I don't like it. Our society doesn't need it's citizens complacent in the act of passively consuming propaganda.
Oddly enough I've seen little identity investment in the esports realm. Perhaps this is because esports are based on multiplayer, competitive videogames where most of the fans who watch esports videos are also players. There's no need to invest in some other Starcraft or LoL team's identity when you yourself play LoL or Starcraft.
Also, the NFL was a SOPA/PIPA sponsor, too.