Page 118 - Cultural Change and Ordinary Life

Enthusing 109

football stadia as providing spaces for identity, community and identification.
In the context of theories of postmodernity and standardization of consumer
activity, Sandvoss considers the changing nature of football stadia, which now
‘offer a theme-parkesque range of services’ (p. 122). There has been a tendency
in much of the literature that because of their similarities and blandness,
people do not form attachments to such places. However, Sandvoss shows that
this is actually not the case. Football fans felt forms of belonging for these
places (p. 133). However, television is also important in offering the opportun-
ity for the reconstitution of such relationships. There has been a tendency
to suggest that television affects community and identity negatively, but
Sandvoss’ broad point (and it is a key point of other fan studies as well) is that
it actually reconstitutes such relationships. Of course, this may have negative
aspects, but then so did ‘traditional’ identifications and communities. Fur-
thermore, because so much football is now consumed via television, this offers
further opportunities for fans to project their identities into different places
and spaces.
There are in Sandvoss’ argument some clear downsides to these devel-
opments and as football becomes more standardized and postmodern (or,
better, hypermodern), ‘a growing number of fans find it difficult to maintain
the common ground of self-reflection and identification with their object of
fandom. As football embodies and expresses tendencies of rationalized and
hyperreal production, fans opposing such changes are confronted with land-
scapes they cannot integrate into their construction of fandom’ (p. 162).
However, while this may be true for some fans, it is not necessarily the most
common experience.
Fundamentally then Sandvoss explores a dynamic between the way that
changes in culture, in this case football as it becomes a transformed mediatized
and consumerist form opens the way for new projections and projects of
identity, but also how football as a representation becomes freer of the original
live event:
The televisual representation of football thus threatens to transform into
its own simulacrum: a copy, endlessly duplicated, to which there is no
original. In this sense, football has entered a postmodern stage. Televi-
sion has set the pace for the transformation of stadia into placeless
environments which seek to emulate the televisual representation of
football, not shape it. Consequently, to many fans football on television
has replaced the actual game as the point of reference.
(Sandvoss 2003: 173)
The extension that Sandvoss speaks of thus double-edged in his view
and the increased narcissism of consumption can cause identity problems. He
therefore does not celebrate this situation.
In this section, I have sought to consider, in the context of audience
studies and a specific consideration of fandom, what can be seen in broad
terms as psychological and sociological processes and to pull out some of the
ways in which such themes have been explored in some path-breaking work
on sport. In the next section, I seek to draw out some further general lessons
from this sort of approach.