Page 186 - CULTURE IN THE COMMUNICATION AGE

CULTURAL THEORY IN POPULAR CULTURE

through his Fox Network, Murdoch owns NFL football and NHL hockey. Via
British-based Foxtel, British-based BSkyB, German-based Vox, Australian-
based Channel Seven, and Hong-Kong-based Star TV, Murdock controls
dominant television rights in one form or another to all major spectator sports:
soccer, rugby, cricket, boxing, Australian football, auto racing, tennis, golf, bad-
minton, motorcycling, table tennis, American football, and baseball (Rowe &
McKay 1999).
In fundamental ways, only a unified theory of culture, heavily indebted to
popular culture theory, makes the three media/sport/cult books possible and
coherent. One book, Sportcult, is organized around ‘building nations’ through
studies of kung fu cinema in Tanzania and cricket in South Africa and Sri
Lanka, ‘building bodies’ through aerobics, bodybuilding, and wrestling, ‘buying
and selling nations and bodies’ through ownership struggles, internationalized
golf, and trash-talking basketball, and ‘signifying sport’ in upward-mobility
documentary, women sports journalists, and battles over sports trademarks. A
second book, MediaSport, examines institutions, texts, and audiences of the
sports/media complex. The themes include games, commodification, market-
place, race and gender, audiences, cyberspace, nationalism, and globalization.
This last theme is developed most extensively in David Whitson’s ‘Circuits of
promotion: Media, marketing and the globalization of sport’. Whitson finds ‘a
new kind of corporate integration in the media and entertainment industries’.
At one level this means transnational investment and marketing on a global
basis. At another level it means vertical integration between ownership of
distribution media and ownership of popular entertainment properties. This
represents a global ‘shift towards integrated corporate ownership of both con-
tent and distribution’ (59). Similarly, Rowe’s examination of Sport, Culture and
the Media revolves around his chapter on global political economy, ‘Money,
myth and the big match: The political economy of the sports media’. The
media sport text has become a valuable commodity, especially as economies
have shifted away from material goods and direct services and towards control
of information and images. Rowe represents a concern of recent important
work in popular culture: ‘There is a marked globalizing trend in media sport
which makes it increasingly hard to insulate any aspect of sport and media in
any particular country from external, disruptive forces’ (1999: 75).
Imagine nineteenth-century colonial anthropologists hearing their theories
of non-rational tribal belief and behavior applied to global experiences touch-
ing more than a billion people at once. They would be bewildered. The appli-
cations of popular culture theory today explode the face-to-face scale of social
analysis known to colonial anthropologists. Because of this, theories of classical
myth and ritual must be complemented with theories of the media text and
political economy and more. Popular culture cases today take us well beyond
the limits of classical definitions and applications.

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