Page 208 - Sport Culture and the Media

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convergent and more uniform one. In theoretical terms, this trend exposes one
of the paradoxes of postmodernization (Crook et al. 1992) – as differentiation
(say, of news and entertainment media functions) gives way to hyper-
differentiation (‘hard’ versus ‘soft’ news within the genre of journalism), the
result is often de-differentiation (the collapse of boundaries between functions
and genres). So, as Real points out in his analysis of the televising of the
Olympics:
The fast-paced Olympic television presentation of multiple events with
on-screen graphics and announcer commentary is the opposite of the
classical coherent, single-authored, focused artistic experience. Underlying
this postmodern presentation is the commercial incentive to maximize
viewing audience by promotion and titillation, by superlatives and
historical allusions, by giving the audience what it expects but in an even
fancier form than it had hoped.
(Real 1996: 242)

In likening the experience of watching the TV Olympics to that of taking in
pop video channels like MTV and the strange film and television of directors
like David Lynch and Quentin Tarantino, Real is proposing that sport has
joined many other mediated cultural forms in being overwhelmed by a (post)-
culture of fragmentation, pastiche and promiscuous borrowing from any style
or genre at hand. Following Jameson’s (1984) characterization of post-
modernism as the ‘logic of late capitalism’ (noted above), such arguments taken
to their fullest extent foresee the complete collapse of all divisions between
texts. This is an improbable development given that the media sports text is still
recognizable as such. Few in full possession of their faculties would mistake
a sports broadcast for a children’s programme or a soap opera, yet this does
not mean that elements from them (the infantilization of the audience or the
dramatization of the action) have not infiltrated the sports text (and, presum-
ably, vice versa). Watching such disparate television shows as the card-game
based Late Night Poker, quiz shows Who Wants to be a Millionaire? and The
Weakest Link, and ‘reality’ programmes like Big Brother, Survivor, Temptation
Island, The Bachelor and Joe Millionaire, the interpenetration of sport and
other TV genres is apparent. Each of these shows contains a strong element of
competition, and borrows freely from sports television and other genres (such
as romance and current affairs). In more muted form than the global media
event, this could be regarded as the triumph of the ‘Contest’ script (Dayan and
Katz 1992: 25). So, just as the conventions of sports television have bled into the
weft and weave of the entire, ever-shifting fabric of TV, live (including delayed
or replayed) television sport has soaked into the embroidered threads of other
genres in its eternal quest for audiences. The series of disconnected cohorts that