Page 196 - Sport Culture and the Media

SCREENING THE ACTION || 177

placing it against a mental standard. Performance is always performance
for someone, some audience that recognizes and validates it as per-
formance even when, as is occasionally the case, the audience is the self.
(Carlson 1996: 5–6)

In the realm of sport, this double consciousness of the performer is reproduced
across a very wide field through the agency of the media. The multiple
opportunities for watching the self, watching the self being watched, watching
what’s being practised against some normative standard – the kind of sur-
veillance and disciplining of the human subject analysed by Foucault (1979,
1980) – are available not just to the professional athlete, but to a battery of
contributors, from coaches and marketeers to television commentators and
directors to sponsors and fans. As Yi-Fu Tan (1990: 243) argues, in a football
stadium, despite clear spatial and role ‘demarcation . . . In a physical-emotional
way, spectators participate as much as they can’. When we stretch the concept
of the stadium, via the media, to the home, school, workplace and street, then
perhaps we are, as Rinehart (1998) puts it, ‘Players All’, and often with aspir-
ations to become an integral part of the media sports text. Thus, spectacular
fan displays in and outside the stadium, like the loud chants of English cricket’s
‘Barmy Army’, the visual displays of Barcelona football club fans, and the
bright hair of Swedish tennis supporters, become critical ‘reading material’ in
sport. There are, as a consequence, attempts by commercial corporations (like
Nike and Vodafone) to harness ‘spontaneous’ fan behaviour for advertising and
promotion, and by national sports associations to make their fans brighter
and noisier (as in the case of the Australian rugby union). The media sports
text, like its audience, is becoming more difficult to govern and interpret.
Peak sports organizations have also begun to recognize this diversifying range
of sports viewing possibilities. FIFA (2002), for example, while measuring a
‘cumulative in-home audience of 28.8 billion viewers’ for Korea/Japan 2002, also
for the first time assessed ‘out-of-home viewing – a key factor in understanding
today’s audiences – [which] has added 2.5 billion to the total’. FIFA also noted
that ‘Futuristic options were on trial, with 16 × 5 wide screen viewing and
delivery to mobile phones’, signalling improvements in the quality of some
sports TV images at the same time as others could be delivered in miniature
but with greater spatial flexibility. Thus, the sports audience is already more
complex than the in-stadium/at-home binary model allows and, as will be
discussed in the Afterword, promises to diversify further with the availability of
new technologies.
Irrespective of the rich range of sports viewing forms and contexts, human
subjects must first be induced to sit or stand before the screen, to pay directly
per view, or to be willing to pay for the option of doing so, even if that option is