How have sports and media changed in the postmodern era of Media Sport? When the 1984 Opening Ceremony featured eighty-four pianos playing Gershwin, Alan Tomlinson was led to conclude: “Television images do linger on; and those of the Los Angeles Olympics of 1984 can only be said to owe more to the spirit of Liberace than to that of de Coubertin” (1989, p. 7-9).
In essence, the postmodern culture of late capitalism links the commercial incentive of the producers of media sports with the conditioned pastiche tastes of the Media Sport consumer in a deep play spectacle of nationalistic technological representation.
Assessing all the evidence, is television making significant positive contributions to sports? Yes. Are there problems and could television do better? Yes, again. Is television a parasite sucking life out of Media’s ports?
However, the symbiosis between them that benefits both sports and media is a dynamic one that can easily become unbalanced and that warrants extensive further inquiry.
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The crucial distinction is that media such as television are only one part, albeit the most prominent part, of a vast cultural seismic shift from the “modern” world of a century ago, with its simple Olympic ideals, to the “postmodern” world of today with its relativism, commercialism, technological saturation and diversity.
To imply that television works alone to corrupt media sports is to over-simplify to the point of misrepresentation. But to say that the televised media sports-such as the Olympics, the Super Bowl, the Oscars, the World Cup, and others-play a leading role in celebrating and shaping our global culture is to begin to approach a realistic sense of the complex place of Media Sport in the world of today.
The institutions of Media Sport structure for us a world of excitement and mythical deep play. But they also shift us away from many positive humanistic values. They inundate us with commercial messages inseparable from the amoral condition of postmodern exploitation. In limited ways within a balanced and rational human life, Media’s ports can make significant positive contributions.
At the same time, not because of individual failures but because of institutionalized capitalist priorities, there is the danger of mindless, misdirected adoration and devotion toward activities and heroes that can so quickly become violent, exploitive, greedy, and narcissistic.
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Being critically self-aware of the negatives of media sports, coupled with an appreciation of the power and joy of those same media sports, provides a minimal basis for acceptance of media sports within a potentially wholesome, balanced, and satisfying human life. Media Sport scholarship provides the necessary score sheets for these issues of cultural sensibilities surrounding sports in a media age.