Essay on Technology and Postmodern Sport

The importance of mediated sports today is evident in both their scale and intensity. The huge scale of media sports appears in audience sizes of many millions for televised sporting events and media contracts for billions of dollars.

The scale is there in the explosion of sport talk radio, sport magazines, Internet sport sites, and consequent global sport marketing, inflated salaries and endorsement contracts. It is there in a public obsession with sport that spills over into attitudes toward schools, politics, family, and daily life.

The intensity of involvement with Media Sports appears in the manner in which individuals become totally absorbed in the mediated sporting event, arranging personal schedules around the events and integrating relationships and ritual activities into the obsession with sport.

The sports media fan modifies patterns of clothing and decoration, searches out supplemental sources of information, enters pools and places bets, joins fantasy leagues, and in other psychological and visible ways expresses the central importance that mediated sports occupy in individual lives.

Institutions, the structured organizations of grouped power in society, ‘connect the large-scale sports media event to intense individual involvement.

In that decisive instant in 1994 when Roberto Baggie’s penalty kick sailed above the goal to end the World Cup final and give Brazil victory, the structured institutions of sports and media made it possible for Brazilians at home to see it and go crazy, for Italians to see it and agonize, for the world to see it and experience emotions of ecstasy, despair, frustration, and satisfaction or dissatisfaction of all kinds.

More than 100 countries had purchased television rights to the World Cup and upwards of a billion people had access to that missed penalty kick in the final shootout.

Institutions of television broadcasting and international sports had created an event and global access to an event that brought together viewers through sophisticated systems of technology, finance, scheduling, and commoditization.

In addition to questions of institutional scale and indi­vidual intensity, Media Sport today suggests other overarching questions, questions largely shaped by the institutional alignments of sports and media in the context of late capitalism.

Has the integration of sports and media into a combined totality moved sports away from classical value assumptions and toward commercialization and profit? Is the relationship between mass media of communication and the world of sports one of exploitation (parasitic) or mutual benefit (symbiotic)?

Is the commercialized ritual involvement of the individual and group in Media’s ports without historical parallel, or is it foreshadowed in traditional theories of co modification, myth and ritual, particularly in the theory of “deep play?” Is the relationship of Media Sport to larger social forces random, or is it the logical result of “late capitalism” as identified in postmodern theory?

Wrestling with these questions (one cannot avoid sports metaphors even in scholarly writing) pits our powers of social analysis against the need to comprehend the power of institutions in society, the meaning of the media texts issuing from these institutions, and the creation of audiences participating at a distance through these powerful social rituals and institutions.

Ignoring Media Sport today would be like ignoring the role of the church in the Middle Ages or ignoring the role of art in the Renaissance; large parts of society are immersed in media sports today and virtually no aspect of life is untouched by it.

But the saturation with sport also makes Media Sport difficult to analyze; it is like asking a fish to analyze water. Those most involved in it often have the worst vantage point from which to comprehend it.

It is essential that we “problematize” Media Sport by stepping outside it and asking questions that a remote anthropologist might ask about this strange and curious set of social texts, practices, and institutions.

There was extensive research and analysis of media and of sports, but there was simply no coherent body of literature that connected the two. Of course, the next several decades filled that gap with a vengeance as important work on sports and media proliferated.

Among the pioneering studies of media and sports were examinations of football on television in the form of British soccer (Buscombe, 1975) and the American Super *Bowl (Real, 1975).

The 1980s saw intense international work. Studies of media and sport explored a variety of issues in Australia by Geoffrey Lawrence and David Rowe and Hart Cantelon and Jean Harvey (1987), in Great Britain by Jennifer Hargreaves (1982), John Hargreaves (1986), Alan Tomlinson and Garry Whannel (1984), and Steve Barnett (1990), in the United States by Benjamin Rader (1984), Lawrence Wenner (1989), and Allen Guttman (1978, 1986, 1988).

Together they documented the awareness that sport is a powerful institutionalized ritual force accessed through the expressive potential of institutionalized media transmissions.

Within the developing literature two conflicting models, both borrowed from biology, characterize the opinions of many experts on the interaction between the institutions of media and sports (Lucas, 1984).

In one model, television is corrupting parasites that latches onto the host body, sport, and draws life support from it while giving nothing back in return (Rader, 1984). In the other model, television and sports are connected symbiotically so that’ each both gives and takes in the relationship, leaving each better off than it would be without the other.

A growing number of sports/media critics argue vigorously for either the parasitic or symbiotic model in the case of numerous sports in the US, in England, and around the world (Whannel, 1992). Taking the modern Olympic Games as a model, what has happened in recent decades due to the institutional structures and priorities of sports and commercial media?

Massive and detailed international research projects have examined the complex and powerful place of television in the past two decades of the Olympics.

A 1984 UNESCO sponsored study (Real, 1989), which I had the privilege of organizing, found great ambiguity in the sociocultural impact of the Olympics: the unifying internationalized rituals of the Olympics exist in tension with divisive nationalistic zeal among commentators and editors.

An exhaustive study of the Los Angeles Games as a media event by Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz (1992) found many positive functions.

The Olympics, they concluded, constitute one of the most influential of the “high holidays” of secular culture today, creating domestic rituals in which family and close friends come together to eat special foods, share time together, and celebrate the athletic competition.

Recent books on the place of television in the 1988 Seoul Olympics (Larson & Park, 1993) and the 1992 Barcelona Olympics (Moragas, Rivenburgh, & Larson, 1995) have identified in satisfying detail how the events in one city become through the mediation of communication technology and broadcast institutions a varied and intriguing television experience for people all over the world.

MediaSports interconnect vast numbers of people, even by the most conservative estimates. Television in the Olympics by Moragas, Rivenburgh, and Larson (1995), for example, clarifies the question of exactly how big the Olympic television audience really is.

The figure of 3.5 billion viewers worldwide was widely cited during the Barcelona Games in 1992. Television in the Olympics notes that this would be possible only if 90 percent of the developed world watched, making 1.1 billion viewers, and 9.7 persons watched each of the 244 million television sets in the developing countries, making 2.4 billion viewers.

The authors suggest a more realistic estimate of 4 to 5 people per television set in the developing world reduces the maximum potential world audience to 2.3 billion.

They further suggest that realistic estimates of viewing for any single event, such as the Opening Ceremony, should be between 700 million and 1 billion, depending on such factors as local interest, timing, alternative program availability, number of viewers per set, and others. The same figure of 700 million to 1 billion is probably not exceeded by the World Cup Final.

Still, who could have imagined a century ago such a widely shared, peaceful coming together as the televised Olympics or World Cup? And is this huge involvement of individuals made possible by the institutional alignments of global sports organizations and global media parasitic or symbiotic, and what role does the postmodern context of late capitalism play?