Page 90 - Sport Culture and the Media

MONEY, MYTH AND THE BIG MATCH || 71

provided and to follow the contours of the argument that media sport is at
the leading edge of cultural and economic development. If cultural factors are
emerging as central to economic processes – and most contemporary analyses
suggest that they are – then sport and the sports media, as cultural goods par
excellence, are clearly a central element in a larger process (or set of processes)
that is reshaping society and culture (Throsby 2001).
Of course, goods have always had a cultural character (Hesmondhalgh 2002)
– the ‘respectable’ appeal of a type of family sedan, the ‘reliable’ qualities of a
brand of vacuum cleaner, and so on – but more and more commodities have
nothing else to declare but their status as cultural goods with appropriately high
levels of ‘sign value’ (Baudrillard 1981), as opposed to the more conventional
Marxist concepts of use value (what something can do) and exchange value
(what something is worth in a direct transaction). As Lash and Urry argue:

[Yet] the objects in contemporary political economies are not just emptied
out of symbolic content. They are also progressively emptied out of
material content. What is increasingly being produced are not material
objects, but signs. These signs are primarily of two types. Either they have
a primarily cognitive content and thus are post-industrial or informational
goods. Or they have primarily an aesthetic, in the broadest sense . . .,
content and they are primarily postmodern goods (Eagleton 1989). This
is occurring, not just in the proliferation of non-material objects which
comprise a substantial aesthetic component (such as pop music, cinema,
magazines, video, etc.), but also in the increasing component of sign value
or image in material objects. This aestheticization of material objects can
take place either in the production or in the circulation and consumption
of such goods.
(Lash and Urry 1994: 14–15)
If we consider this argument in relation to media sports texts, then they can be
said to be particularly valuable not only because of their ‘substantial aesthetic
component’ (the principal object of media sport is the aesthetics of bodies –
their beauty, condition, size, effectiveness – in motion under specified con-
ditions), but also because of their key role in the informational order (cognitive in
only a limited sense in terms of ‘patented’ knowledge about training techniques
and regimes, but certainly an informational sign given sport’s major role in the
news media). Media sports texts, with their almost unprecedented capacity to
‘flow across and around these economies of signs and space’ in both local and
global contexts, their very high levels of ‘sign-value’, and with their intimate
connection to all-pervasive ‘information and communication structures’ (Lash
and Urry 1994: 6), are almost perfect prototypes of signs in circulation, heavily
loaded with symbolic value.