Routledge Handbook of Sport and New Media

Andrew C Billings, Marie Hardin, Andrew C Billings, Marie Hardin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781136292125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

New media technologies have become a central part of the sports media landscape. Sports fans use new media to watch games, discuss sports transactions, form fan-based communities, and secure minutiae about their favorite players and teams. Never before have fans known so much about athletes, whether that happens via Twitter feeds, fan sites, or blogs, and never before have the lines between producer, consumer, enactor, fan and athlete been more blurred. The Internet has made virtually everything available for sports media consumption; it has also made understanding sports media substantially more complex.

The Routledge Handbook of Sport and New Media is the most comprehensive and in-depth study of the impact of new media in sport ever to be published. Adopting a broad, interdisciplinary approach, the book explores new media in sport as a cultural, social, commercial, economic, and technological phenomenon, examining the profound impact of digital technologies on that the way that sport is produced, consumed and understood. There is no aspect of social life or commercial activity in general that is not being radically influenced by the rise of new media forms, and by offering a "state of the field" survey of work in this area, the Routledge Handbook of Sport and New Media is important reading for any advanced student, researcher or practitioner with an interest in sports studies, media studies or communication studies.

Part I

Foundations

1

Globalization and Online Audiences

David Rowe

UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN SYDNEY

Brett Hutchins

MONASH UNIVERSITY

Introduction: Going online, becoming global

The concept of globalization appears to fit perfectly with the phenomenon of the online audience. In reflecting on this seemingly natural affinity, we can first take a standard glossary definition of globalization as “a process through which space and time are compressed by technology, information flows, and trade and power relations, allowing distant actions to have increased significance at the local level” (Miller, Lawrence, McKay and Rowe, 2001: 131). Here the critical elements of flow and fluidity that are integral to any conception of globalization articulate smoothly with what we generally conceive as “being online,” which involves connection to the Internet and the World Wide Web anywhere across the globe. Online audiences for sport and other mediated content would, therefore, seem to be perfectly suited to the globalization process in receiving and dispatching communication, free of hitherto awkward constraints of time, space and technology. Thus, for example, an online sport fan ought, at least technically, to be able to access any mediated sport text that they desire, and to interact freely via computer mediated communication with any fellow fan, irrespective of their physical-spatial location.

The use here of the conditional tense, though, signals the need for some caution in making such sweeping claims. The gap between what might be possible in the abstract, and actual material conditions, may be considerable in empirical terms. For example, the so-called “digital divide” (Norris, 2001) can be highlighted as demonstrating the extent to which the process of globalization is uneven and hierarchically ordered. As Curran (2011: 89) has noted:

In the late 1990s, the richest fifth of the population had 86 per cent of the world’s GDP [Gross Domestic Product], while the poorest fifth had just 1 per cent – an enormous disparity that has broadly persisted. This disparity is reproduced as a structure of access to the Internet, with the world’s poor being largely excluded. Their voice is muted, and their participation limited, by poverty. This is illustrated by the fact that the entire continent of Africa hosted fewer websites than London in 2000.

Although the digital divide consists of a complex series of measures of access, capacity, use and so on, and there is considerable variation in its extent between and within world regions, a recent report by the International Telecommunication Union (2012) showed continuing considerable global disparities. The composite ICT Development Index (IDI) involving 11 indicators that it applied across countries revealed that, “European countries generally rank very high in the IDI, with a regional average of 6.49, which is clearly outstanding in international comparison,” (p. 45) while “Africa remains the region with the lowest average IDI (1.88), less than half the global average (4.15)” (p. 48). Increasing variation in ICT development “in the Arab States, CIS [Commonwealth of Independent States] and Africa,” it found, indicated “that regional differences are widening. This is a rather alarming trend, which suggests that the digital divide, both globally and regionally, is widening” (p. 48).

However, even if such structural inequalities impeding online access did not exist, theoretical and conceptual debates about globalization would not be rendered irrelevant. Notably, there are considerable differences about how the process of globalization, if it is accepted as valid at all, can be characterized. The “grand narrative” of an unstoppable wave that annihilates temporal and spatial barriers is interrupted by many less conclusive accounts of change, continuity, adaptation, resistance and uncertainty. For example, George Ritzer (2011: 2, original emphasis) advances a definition of globalization that resists some of the blander summations of the process, seeing it as:

…a transplanetary process or set of processes involving increasing liquidity and the growing multi-directional flows of people, objects, places and information as well as the structures they encounter and create that are barriers to, or expedite, those flows.

In contrast to many other definitions of globalization, this one does not assume that greater integration is an inevitable component of globalization. That is, globalization can bring with it greater integration (especially when things flow easily), but it can also serve to reduce the level of integration (when structures are erected that successfully block flows).

This is not the place to examine competing theories and conceptualizations of globalization in great detail, but it is clear that there are considerable differences over the nature and extent of globalization, including the degree to which the nation state retains its potency (Hirst and Thompson, 2009); the relationship between global power, nations and cosmopolitanism (Beck, 2005); its positioning among other complex processes (Urry, 2003) and, indeed, the validity of the concept itself (see various contributions to Held and McGrew, 2007a).These differences, at their starkest, produce utopian and dystopian analyses (Rowe, 2006), with the former emphasizing the process of globalization as an advance for humanity in promoting universalism, trade, movement, and communication. At the same time, it can be seen from this perspective to have a positive effect in eroding a narrow introversion and even ignorance that obstructs human progress by compulsively erecting material and symbolic borders between people based, in particular, on nation states (Ohmae, 1995). By contrast, the dystopian view sees globalization as a homogenizing force that undermines socio-cultural difference and nation-based selfdetermination in ways that weaken resistance to supranational capitalist exploitation and political domination, and further empowers elites (Starr, 2005). Between these polar positions can be found more mixed analytical appraisals of globalization (Held and McGrew, 2007b) that qualify both the totalizing nature of the process and its actual implications in material environments as opposed to abstract models.

The institution of sport, alongside the audiences attached to it in various ways, is very well suited to exploring these questions of globalization and online constituencies. Sport is both practiced and followed in specific spatial-temporal contexts (such as the “live” event at the stadium), and yet what happens within that limited space and time can be experienced and monitored in very different contexts. Thus, for example, only 80,000 people could have watched Usain Bolt win the men’s 100 meters athletics final “live” at the Olympic Stadium in Stratford, in the east of London in the UK, during the 2012 Summer Games. Yet, for those unable to “be there,” the race could be viewed in an array ofviewing environments (sometimes in high definition and in 3D) – for example, at a “live site” elsewhere in London or in any other public space across the globe with a satellite link; in a hall, pub, cinema or some other public or commercial building, or via television broadcast or otherwise conveyed into the private space of the home. By means of these media arrangements, the “live” audience can be measured in billions rather than thousands. However, it is not only audiences and their spatial locations that have proliferated. Broadcast television is now supplemented by an array of other platforms, including Internet-enabled television sets, mobile (also known as cell) phones, tablets, game consoles, desktop, laptop and notebook computers. This impressive mediated “live” audience, although it is large and aspires to be “global” in terms of reach and simultaneity, is only one manifestation of audiences in the global “media sports cultural complex” (Rowe, 2004, 2011). Despite the “accelerated culture” that can be said now to be integral to the contemporary world (and which Steve Redhead, 2007, relates to sport “on behalf” of the theorist of speed, Paul Virilio), media sport audiences do not form and disappear in the less than ten seconds that it takes sprinters such as Bolt to run 100 meters.

Sport audiences have never been constituted only around the time of the live event. Indeed, before the advent of radio and television broadcasting, they were largely reliant on the print media to provide information about sportspeople, clubs and other fans, and to preview, report on and discuss sport contests and their implications in ways that could not overlap with those contests as they happened in real time. In contrast, broadcasting was able to intensify the focus on sport events as they occurred, but did so in ways that would facilitate even more media coverage through highlight programs, replays, panels, quiz shows and so on. Furthermore, sport fans have never been wholly reliant on the professional media to communicate with others beyond their own neighborhoods – the rudimentary newsletters of sport fan clubs, and the small-circulation, amateur “fanzines” (Haynes, 1995) that were printed, sold and circulated among fellow fans as a “labor of love,” are examples of sport audiences also becoming minor producers of media sport texts in the pre-digital era. Fanzines, which were especially popular in British association football in the 1980s and 1990s, could take the form of “garage-style” fan publications devoted to their favorite teams, like Manchester United’s United We Stand, or more sophisticated and widely distributed works, often with contributions from “moonlighting” professional sports journalists, such as When Saturday Comes. The crucial change is that new media technologies – or what we prefer to call the emergence of “networked media sport” (Hutchins and Rowe, 2012) – has created a dense, rich media environment in which sport can be viewed, discussed and, in some cases, organized among online sport constituencies in ways that challenge the traditional distinction between audience and participant. One of the characteristics of this networked media sport milieu is that, while place and space are still important aspects of the experience of sport, the globalization of the sport industry and of new information, communication and media technologies has created many more opportunities both to “attend” to sport in traditional terms and to intervene in its discourses and modes of organization. As a consequence, what is commonly regarded as the audience acquires new properties and possibilities.

Media sport audiences in transition

The media audience has been the subject of intense academic debate for many decades, with initial concerns about audience manipulation by media challenged by those who have emphasized that audiences are active rather than passive (Ruddock, 2001). With the rise of“new” or “social media,” the concept of the audience itself has been thrown into question, with the capacity of individuals to communicate via blogging, Twitter, Facebook and other forms of “chat” suggesting for some that the institutional media are now outmoded in their capacity to create, maintain and influence audiences. As Virginia Nightingale (2011: 2) has noted in her introduction to the compendious Handbook of Media Audiences:

…some new media commentators argue that because people can now broadcast themselves online, the need for audience research is at an end. This view is based on a narrow understanding of broadcast media audiences as passive recipients of broad-cast messages, and it overlooks the emphasis on the “active audience” that has been so influential in audience studies for the last quarter of a century and more.

Still, many media scholars today do feel impatient and more than a little bored with the term audience, and by implication with audience research. There is a sense that the term is inadequate to explain the sorts of things people do with media now that social media and web 2.0 have transformed the media landscape.

It is ironic that, with media and telecommunications corporations continuing to expend vast sums on acquiring the rights to premium sport in the quest for large audiences for exposure to advertising and/or paying subscribers (Rowe, 2011), some media scholars should have become “bored” with the idea of the audience. In 2012, the US media corporation NBC (owned by Comcast) successfully bid US$4.38 billion for US media rights to the four Olympic Games between 2014 and 2020, having spent US$5.55 billion on the seven previous Games of the twenty-first century (Hufington Post, 2012). Unlike “some media scholars,” media companies like NBC, Fox, CBS and ABC, and even public service media corporations like the UK’s BBC and Canada’s CBC, are not indifferent to the size and composition of audiences. Sport is becoming increasingly important as a TV program genre that is far healthier than most others at a time of falling aggregate viewer ratings. As Gregory (2010) has noted in the US context:

It’s no secret that with an array of cable channels, video games and the Internet competing for viewers’ attention, the audiences for network television are eroding. These days, even the biggest hits are suffering: average viewership for the Wednesday-night broadcast of Fox’s American Idol, for instance, was down 14% from last season. The audience for CSI, on CBS, dropped nearly 19% from 2009 to 2010; the Tuesday-night broadcasts of ABC’s Dancing with the Stars fell 9.2%, according to Nielsen data.

But amid these sagging performances, television appears to be experiencing a resurgence in a surprising place: sports programming. Of the 13 television programs that drew more than 30 million viewers over the past year, 11, or 85%, were sports-related, according to a new research report from Horizon Media, a media buying and planning agency. The only non-sports-related shows were the Oscars and the first episode of the CBS reality show Undercover Boss – which debuted immediately following the network’s broadcast of the Super Bowl.

Given the popularity of sport as a key form of “appointment television,” it is unsurprising that the media sport industry consensus is that “sports media rights are rich and getting richer, and profitable to the networks paying the money, thanks to huge consumer demand and the DVR [Digital Video Recorder]-proof nature of live sports programming” (Van Riper, 2012). Instead, media and telecommunications corporations are purchasing comprehensive sports rights, including online and mobile, in order to find and form audiences anywhere among the technologies that they possess and the spaces that they inhabit.

Media sport audiences are heterogeneous – that is, they consist of people with very different relationships to the sport that is being represented to them (Solberg and Hammervold, 2008; Whannel, 1992). Aggregate audiences range from aficionados who are deeply interested in some sports (or are devoted to sport in general) to those who intermittently or “accidentally” encounter sport texts, and may be attracted by tangential aspects of sport, such as the dramatic presentation of the Olympic Opening Ceremony, the half-time music shows at the Super Bowl, celebrities spotted in sports crowds, or the human interest “back stories” of particular teams and athletes. Media companies that pay for rights attempt in some way to cater to all potential audience fractions depending on the platform. For exam...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Defining ubiquity: Introduction to the Routledge Handbook of Sport and New Media
• Part I Foundations
• Part II Sports/media producers
• Part III The message: Shaping, marketing, branding
• Part IV Audiences: Fanship, consumption
• Part V Identities in the digital realm
• Index