Page 185 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

MICHAEL REAL

parenting, independence, uncertainty, commitment. To one media professional,
the coverage of her death ‘represented an important public catharsis about all
sorts of different issues – about women and their place in society, about how the
famous and their fans interact’ (Sharkey 1997: 21).

The globalization of media sport culture
The scale of some popular spectacles does not mean there is one uniform,
multinational form of culture taking over the world today, quite the contrary.
Within the popular are multiple contradictions and differences that make any
specific manifestation of culture today distinctive in its peculiar combinations
of the elite and the mass, the new and the old, the global and the local, the
borrowed and the invented. Popular culture theory takes very seriously how
technology, popular ritual, the spectacle, commerce, hegemony, and other
dynamics of the popular create representation and meaning in everyday life.
At the turn of the millennium, current technologies of the Internet,
digitization, interactivity, and broadband instantaneous multimedia manage to
accelerate the technological trends begun with the telegraph, telephone, sound
recording, electricity, film, wireless, and other technologies of the nineteenth
century. Cultural theories of collage, displacement, historical contingency,
intertextuality, transnationalization, postcolonialism, and everyday life com-
plexify and correct the work of nineteenth-century colonial anthropology.
Clifford Geertz’s (1973) essay on the cockfight in Bali, perhaps the most widely
cited piece of cultural theory in the past half century, added a more humble,
postmodern reading of ‘other’ cultures, deleting the imperialism of colonial-era
ethnographers while opening up the ‘textual’ interpretation of culture.
At the millennium, theorizing about the ‘media sport nexus’ reflected the
consensus in popular culture theory in a global context. David Rowe’s Sport,
Culture and the Media (1999) joined the anthologies MediaSport (Wenner 1998)
and SportCult (Martin and Miller 1999) in bringing together cultural theory
and case studies of specific instances of media-transmitted sports activities.
These works held in common that global factors are central to current popular
culture; witness the parallel developments in mediated sports in di fferent
countries as media moguls buy up sporting events and teams. Disney buys
baseball and hockey teams (the Anaheim Angels and Mighty Ducks) at the
same time that it buys a television network (ABC), and similar media/sport
combinations emerge in Australia, the UK, Europe, Asia, and Latin America.
But, in addition to that parallel-development form of globalization, a more
multinational form of globalization was also taking place as a single individual
or corporation would buy up and merge media and sports institutions simul-
taneously in different countries. Illustrating this, Rupert Murdoch appears
repeatedly in each of the three media/sport/cult books. His empire is the living
embodiment of the most blatant ‘globalization’ of popular culture. Murdoch
controls or is part-owner of television rights around the globe. In America,

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