Page 16 - Sport Culture and the Media

PREF ACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

(SEC OND EDITION)

The opportunity to publish a second edition is both irresistible and prob-
lematic. The great advantage is that the work can be updated and enhanced,
and some of its more embarrassing moments ‘airbrushed’ for posterity.
But there is also a question of fidelity to the spirit of the original work and
to the historical conditions of its creation. To take an example from the world
of popular music, my first academic love, this is analogous to using digital
re-mastering to make a recording sound cleaner, glitch-free and more con-
temporary. The result may be technically superior but something intangible can
be lost in the mix, usually some of the distinctiveness and boldness that was a
strong aspect of the music’s first appeal. This book is not a collection of tunes,
but it is a considered reflection, after some five years, of changes to the ‘media
sports cultural complex’ and in ways of analysing it within Cultural and Media
Studies. It represents, therefore, the author’s response to these shifts in the field
and to its object of analysis in ways that are consistent with the principal
concerns of the first edition of Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly
Trinity.
I have tried to avoid obsessive tinkering with the original text, but I have not
always succeeded in resisting the temptation of performing some fine-grained
adjustment. In mitigation I plead that most of us, knowing what we (didn’t)
know five years later, would do things differently given the chance. More
importantly, I have attempted to register and interrogate as necessary the major
changes in media sport and its analysis that have occurred since I completed the
first manuscript in 1998. These are of such consequence as to make me wish
that I worked in a narrower, less contemporary field that doesn’t mutate every
time I glance away from it. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology come to