Page 229 - Sport Culture and the Media

210 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

the BBC web site had record traffic during the month of the 2002 World Cup,
while:

guardian.co.uk/football quadrupled its best-ever traffic. On one day it
overtook the news front as the most popular site and provided us
with a new one-day traffic record of more than 4m impressions. To
put this in context, September 11 and 12 showed 2.4m and 2.7m page
impressions respectively. In June we had 10 days with 2.8m or more
page impressions.
(Bell 2002)
Without having even to search the web, sports information services like
Infostradasports send out regular emails to subscribers full of sports statistics
and event previews. Other non-broadcast developments involve the cultivation
of online sports ‘communities’ where web sites can provide information on
events, players and products, but can also enable, for example, amateur golfers
to take part in an online golf competition by filing their weekly scores to a web
site (Johnston 2000). The short message service (SMS) technology that took
off so spectacularly in the early twenty-first century in the wake of the mobile
phone boom has been quickly harnessed to sports results, competitions,
merchandising and advertising. Association football clubs like Arsenal and
Manchester United have been quick to exploit the flexibility of mobile phones
through, respectively, O2 and Vodafone (Carter 2002). As noted in Chapter 3,
the more sophisticated mobile phones are now able to handle moving sports
images, although television companies are highly resistant to live sports viewing
of this kind (Wray 2003). Thus media sport can be seen to be much more
than watching television, catching radio broadcasts and reading print texts.
Virtually every new communication technology and service seeks a sporting
application, because sport is universally seen as a key driver for their uptake.
This means that media sport is hunting down customers at every breathing
moment and in every conceivable space. The primary justifications for these
developments in media sport are flexibility, interactivity, agency and empower-
ment. No sports fan need be out of range or constrained by faceless cultural
producers making choices on their behalf on a ‘one size fits all’ basis. The
customization of media sport and the enlistment of consumers as co-producers,
therefore, can be interpreted within a post-Fordist framework of flexible
and reflexive accumulation, production and consumption of cultural goods
(Hall 1989; Lash and Urry 1994). It is also, paradoxically, both a sign of gather-
ing globalization (each site is connected to every other) and something of a
repudiation of it (the splintering of cultural practice). The key analytical
response to these shifts, however, is that they do not necessarily represent
a transformation of prevailing socio-cultural relations and their formations of