In an interview with Under the Ring (via Wrestling Inc), Dark Side of the Ring producer Evan Husney spoke about his belief that social media has had a negative influence on the wrestling industry.
He said: “The social media era, I think, has been bad for wrestling in general. It’s taken a lot of the magic away, I think, from wrestling. But I do think there are habits — there are better habits — that most of the wrestlers are into now. I think the fact that, for example, cannabis is more accepted as a good thing in wrestling, where there [are] alternative ways to combat pain than there ever [has] been. I think that is better generally.” While our modern culture has had some benefit on wrestlers, Husney still thinks the change in fan perspective has altered wrestling into something else. Fans are fixated so much on the decisions of the people behind the scenes writing these storylines than they are losing themselves in the wrestling, which is what the whole point is. But also the writers aren’t doing a very good job of letting us lose ourselves in the magic of wrestling either, you know? So it’s become this very meta, weird exercise that I don’t quite understand, and it doesn’t feel right to me. It feels like something new. It feels like we’re squabbling over the way things are presented. … It’s just a weird metric that people are evaluating wrestling [by] today that actually has nothing to do with the wrestling.“
He said: “The social media era, I think, has been bad for wrestling in general. It’s taken a lot of the magic away, I think, from wrestling. But I do think there are habits — there are better habits — that most of the wrestlers are into now. I think the fact that, for example, cannabis is more accepted as a good thing in wrestling, where there [are] alternative ways to combat pain than there ever [has] been. I think that is better generally.” While our modern culture has had some benefit on wrestlers, Husney still thinks the change in fan perspective has altered wrestling into something else. Fans are fixated so much on the decisions of the people behind the scenes writing these storylines than they are losing themselves in the wrestling, which is what the whole point is. But also the writers aren’t doing a very good job of letting us lose ourselves in the magic of wrestling either, you know? So it’s become this very meta, weird exercise that I don’t quite understand, and it doesn’t feel right to me. It feels like something new. It feels like we’re squabbling over the way things are presented. … It’s just a weird metric that people are evaluating wrestling [by] today that actually has nothing to do with the wrestling.“
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