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AFTERWORD ||  205


                           bring up her statistics (including bust size), and even monitor her pulse and
                           body temperature (so you know just how hot she is) . . . But the biggest
                           advantage the Internet will offer is viewer shot selection. While we already
                           have things such as race cam, you’re at the mercy of the program director
                           as to when it’s shown.
                             With Internet broadcasting, however, you’ll be able to choose which
                           camera you want to look through at any one time, meaning that when a
                           car crashes and burns during the Grand Prix, you will be able to look
                           through the race cam to watch the medics arrive.
                             If that doesn’t tickle your fancy, then there’s set to be another develop-
                           ment within the not too distant future – athlete cam. Thanks to miniature
                           cams strapped to the athlete’s body, you’ll finally get close enough to the
                           action to almost smell the sweat.
                             And when virtual reality arrives, you’ll also be able to feel the blows of a
                           hard tackle in a rugby match, provided both you and the footballer wear
                           virtual reality bodysuits.
                                                                       (Kaufman 1998: 139)

                         Using digital technology to be ‘able to see the replay from any angle you so
                         choose, or [you might want] to flip between two simultaneous matches’ (Shipp,
                         quoted in Austin 1998: 5) and to create the home virtual stadium, ‘when anyone
                         will be able to buy a headset and decoder and actually feel like they are part
                         of the game’ (Cockerill 1997: 52), combine the partial appropriation of the
                         media technology once the preserve of media professionals with the simulation
                         of the experience not only of attending sports events ‘in the flesh’ as spectators,
                         but also of participating as ‘cyber’ athletes. Hence, we are taken well beyond
                         the ‘seeing at a distance’ that (as noted in Chapter 6), Weber (1996) views as the
                         characteristic feature of television. Paradoxically, the new media technology is
                         artificially trying to produce the ‘feel’ of ‘having been there’ as participant or
                         spectator long after television  first lured sports players and fans away from
                         stadia towards the armchair. Of course, only a tiny proportion of potential
                         athletes and fans can ever be ‘actors’ in the unique space and time of actual
                         sports events. Digital media technology, therefore, delivers ‘actuality’ in place
                         of the impossible.
                           Less ambitiously, those same technologies feed the other huge appetites
                         of followers of sport – for information and dialogue. Web sites like Soccernet
                         receive approaching 100,000 ‘hits’ a day (up to 800,000 during peak events),
                         providing ‘news and analysis of games in the English and Scottish leagues as
                         well as World Cup pages, a soccer store, newsletter, spot the ball and indexes in
                         Argentina, Chile, Colombia, The Netherlands, Spain and Uruguay’ (Austin and
                         Harper 1998: 4), and planning to ‘introduce animated action replays – running
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