Remember The Last Dance, the documentary about Michael Jordan's last season with the Chicago Bulls? Remember that weird talk show clip where the host describes

Remember The Last Dance, the documentary about Michael Jordan's last season with the Chicago Bulls? Remember that weird talk show clip where the host describes Jordan as close to a living god? Now, Michael Jordan was an awesome athlete, but I think his mythos owes a lot to the specific media landscape at the time. That is, media was extensive enough for a person to be a truly global star, but for the most part it only went one way. The media gave you an image of Michael and, for the most part, the image was pretty close to "living god". In contrast, modern media is intensely participatory. There are vicious comment sections and viral Tweets dunking on every person. Nobody seems to stay above it for very long. There's a famous, maybe apocryphal quote where John Updike explains Ted Williams' decision to mostly ignore fans as "gods do not answer letters". But at this point, fame seems to require answering letters. I think people need to maintain some kind of distance to be the sort of heroes described in this article, but the culture we have seems pretty opposed to this kind of distance.