Suchergebnisse

This book investigates the integration of media and sport over the last century. At a time when the stability of the Western media sport order is under challenge, it analyses a range of key structures, practices and issues whose ramifications extend far beyond the fields of play and national contexts in which sport events take place.

Mediated sport has assumed an extraordinary position in contemporary global culture. It is enormously popular, especially when stimulated by both artful and 'carpet bomb' marketing and promotion. It is, correspondingly, in high commercial demand in the transition from scheduled, 'appointment' broadcast television to a more flexible, mobile system of on-demand viewing on multiple platforms. The 'nowness' of sport means that it is highly effective in assembling massive, real-time audiences in an era of increasing fragmentation both in terms of numbers and viewing rhythms. At the same time, sport routinely insinuates itself into the everyday lives of citizens in ways that are no more uniform than the people who encounter it. Even among enthusiastic participants in, and aficionados of, sport, there is considerable experiential diversity in engagement with it in mediated form. Socio-cultural variables such as age, gender, ethnicity and social class, as well as dispositions of sporting taste, are responsible for considerable differences in the practices associated with mediated sport. This article addresses current research on cultural citizenship and sport in Australia, drawing on qualitative data from Greater Western Sydney, Australia's most demographically diverse region, in analysing the various ways in which citizens engage with sport as participants and spectators. It explores the research participants' views concerning their rights to access 'live' mediated sport within a broad framework of cultural citizenship, analysing the tension between commercial and citizen relationships in the production of public culture. Finally, the article considers problems associated with such access, including with regard to the so-called 'gamblification' of sport.

On the 50th anniversary of the ISSA and IRSS, a key international figure in the study of media and sport within the sociology of sport, David Rowe, reflects on the field as a whole and the role for studying media and power within it. Rowe considers how some development in the sociology of sport within the larger discipline of sociology may be seen as 'gestural and instrumental'. In considering the challenges of the field, Rowe notes how the media serves to situate and amplify sport's inherent powers of 'liveness', whether sport is manifest in mega-events or in 'extraordinary ordinariness'. The closing section of the essay focuses on questions of media and power, foremost those concerning spectacle and commodification and their intersection with politics and the transactions of nationalized identities with those of race, ethnicity and gender in a globalized media sports cultural complex.

Abstract
Over the last decade there have been well-documented, far-reaching changes to the media environment as digitalization – among other forces and processes – has substantially altered media production, consumption and use. A notable consequence of this shift has been the intensified co-dependency of the media and (especially 'live') sport, and the continuing expansion of the 'media sports cultural complex'. The developing phenomenon of social media now figures prominently across the cultural sphere (including the 'zone' of media and sport), but it is necessary to question some ostensibly over-optimistic or premature claims about its lasting significance as a vehicle for human liberation. Thus, in considering a broad research agenda in this domain for the next decade, the centrality of political economy, media history, and anti-technological determinism are emphasized as necessary components of any workable analytical engagement with questions of power, media and cultural politics.

Major sport spectacles are probably the most potent, vibrant stages on which human drama can be played out in real time before a vast international audience. Media sport, through global scale 'frozen moments', can precipitate popular interrogations of 'race' and its myriad connections to other socio-cultural structures and identities. This article considers the case of the now infamous incident of French captain Zinedine Zidane head-butting the Italian Marco Materazzi during the 2006 World Cup Final of association football in Germany, as a striking example of the political resonance and reach of mega-media sport, as well as of the perils of being 'lost' and 'found' in popular media translation. The persistence and pervasiveness of sexism in the language and metaphor of racism, it is argued, is an essential ingredient of the 'sexual racism' within the patriarchal genre of sports field insults. The immediate speculation and intense search for 'signs' of racism in the Zidane-Materazzi affair reveals that it lurks close below the surface of contemporary sport. This article advocates a cultural politics that understands and resists the causes of racism through sport, just as it refuses to legitimize racialized categories of the human in the process.

AbstractThe institutions of media and sport have increasingly converged over the last century, forming a media sports cultural complex of global proportions. This development has raised concerns over whether sport has become 'mediatised' and, conversely, that the media are increasingly 'sportised'. The media sports cultural complex generates a vast array of representations of sport and the societies of which it is a part. It is important, therefore, to analyse the ways in which media sport texts reproduce or challenge prevailing ideologies of socio‐cultural power in such key areas as gender, 'race', ethnicity, and sexuality. Media sport texts are especially instrumental in representing national identities and international relations in an era of intensified globalisation. In covering events of national cultural significance, they are also implicated in issues surrounding 'cultural citizenship' and in attempts by sport fan communities to exercise greater control over a fluid, dynamic and highly contested media sport environment.