Page 43 - Sport Culture and the Media

24 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

through which we experience, interpret, mould and represent everything that
surrounds us – then sport occupies, as noted in the Introduction, an uncom-
monly prominent position within it. The economy of sport is, then, more than
the exchange of money for tickets, of wages for performance on the field of
play. There is also a cultural economy of sport, where information, images,
ideas and rhetorics are exchanged, where symbolic value is added, where meta-
phorical (and sometimes literal, in the case of publicly listed sports clubs)
stocks rise and fall. This cultural (and material) economy of sport has
developed through ‘cottage industry’ and early industrial and capital accumula-
tive phases to a full-blown, sophisticated complex. Once elements of sport had
become rationalized and industrialized, they necessarily entered into relations
with other economic entities that acted as conduits, carrying sports culture
far beyond its places of origin. As noted above, the institution (which, more
accurately, is a constellation of diverse but related structures and practices) that
has become crucial to the destiny of modern sport is the media.
The media have created the capacity for sport to reach its staggering global
audience and to ‘service’ that audience, reproducing and transforming sports
culture through an endless and pervasive process of showing, ‘sounding’, dis-
cussing, depicting – in short, of representing sport in myriad ways. Before
we can proceed to an analysis of the sports media, we must first understand,
through cultivating a socio-historical sensibility, not only why contemporary
sport needs the media so desperately, but also why the media have an equal and
urgent need for sport.

The rise of the mass media

As in the case of the physical play and game contests that mutated into sport,
communication using a variety of aural and visual media is an ancient practice,
from cave paintings and ‘sagas’ told around camp fires through religious icons
and hand-written books, to satellite broadcasts and computer graphics. A key
element of the rise of capitalism and industrialism was the transformation of
small-scale and technologically rudimentary media into an institutional com-
plex of enormous social, cultural, political and economic importance. These
‘mass media comprise the institutions and techniques by which specialized
social groups disseminate symbolic content to large heterogeneous and geo-
graphically-dispersed audiences’ (Bennett et al. 1977: 9, adapted from Janowitz
1968). The standard accounts of the development of mass communication
(such as Bittner 1983; McQuail 1987) chronicle the ‘take off’ points, such as the
invention in 1450 of the Gutenberg press that gave birth to print and, later, the
arrival of radio transmitters followed by the cathode ray tube that brought us