Page 117 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

108 Cultural change and ordinary life

about performance, audience and spectacle. Fans seek an audience for these
performances of the extended self (Sandvoss 2003: 42–3):

In the following extract, two fans discuss the degree to which they them-
selves succeed in becoming performers on a mass mediated stage:
Harald: All right, I like to watch all the surroundings [on television].
Thomas: I watched the game on DSF yesterday again and what do
they show? Two brain-dead people standing around somewhere,
who applaud. But they didn’t show our choreography.
Harald: Against Monaco you could see the choreography, but that
was coincidence.
(Harald and Thomas, Bayer Leverkusen fans)
Thus, in seeking an audience, they have become performers. In addi-
tion, Sandvoss argues that the audience of this performance itself decays
as with Echo in the Narcissus myth. In these ways fandom as attachment
involves processes of extension and reflection that make audiences performers
and which have major implications for the self. I take up these arguments
further later. The second key aspect of Sandvoss’ argument concerns diffusion,
globalization and place.
Sandvoss explores the nature of communities as they are formed around
football. As I have discussed earlier, there is often an assumption in more
simple forms of the globalization thesis that community would be obliterated
by globalizing processes. However, as I have considered, what is actually hap-
pening is that the nature of community is changing. With particular attention
to place, I have theorized this via concepts of elective belonging and scene so
far. Sandvoss’ consideration of the specific form of culture reinforces this
emphasis. His emphasis is on the ‘voluntary’ nature of contemporary com-
munity: ‘Fandom, as I have argued, can now be forged by drawing on an
endless variety of texts originating in modern mass media and first of all televi-
sion. This is not to argue that identification with local clubs has ceased, but
that it has become optional’ (p. 91, my emphasis). Sandvoss uses the idea of
imagined community to theorize the way that fans think about their connec-
tions to other fans of the same club. For Sandvoss, considered through the
example of football, and using Tomlinson (1999), locales are ‘complex cultural
spaces’ (p. 92). As the fan base for the larger clubs widens globally so such clubs
have ‘local’ and ‘global’ fans. This then involves a reconstruction of what it
means to have local rivalries. Sandvoss discusses the example of Chelsea fans
living in Norway who see ‘Manchester United, Liverpool or other London
clubs as their local rivals’ (p. 100). These are not necessarily the traditional
rivals for Chelsea, as: ‘The symbolic space of shared competition emerges as
more important in the construction of self-identity and group membership
than the actual geographical place inhabited by fans’ (p. 100). It should be
recognized that such forms of fandom are no less ‘authentic’ than those
associated with ‘traditional’ patterns of residence. Similar points with respect
to other sports are made by Crawford (2004).
Another important part of Sandvoss’ argument concerns the nature of