Page 13 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

2 • Sport, Media and Society

the Olympic flame in Greece. In addition, developments in communication technol-

ogy have meant that protesters no longer need to rely on official media channels
to voice their concerns as they can upload their own footage to YouTube and other
video sharing Web sites.
Media protests at sport events illuminate the constant interaction between sport,
media and society. Sport is a product of society and bears its imprint in every aspect
of its manifestation. The international sporting events that attract the world’s media
are intrinsically connected to the global political and economic organisation of soci-
ety. Sport is enmeshed in the networks of global capitalism. Sport spectacles provide
platforms for cities to attract international investment and garner tourist trade. Suc-

cess on the sporting field is used to symbolise national success and to promote gov-
ernment policies. The bodies of sports people are branded with the logos of global
corporations, transferring the qualities of the athletes onto consumer goods for mass
consumption. The communication and media networks enable these connections to
be made and broadcast around the world. Olympic protests reveal the overt political
content of mediated sport, but there is implicit political content encoded into every
sport broadcast. As Frey and Eitzen (1991: 507) observed, the media representation
of sport ‘can influence our ideas about sport, our perceptions of gender, race, social

relations, and proper behaviours, and our adherence to certain values’. These are the
everyday politics that are equally inseparable from media sport.
The academic discipline of sociology of sport has addressed itself to unravelling
the social and political dimensions of sport in both their explicit and implicit forms.
Investigations of the sport media have been intrinsic to this aim. The way that sport
is represented in the media can illuminate central themes in the relationship between
sport and society. For example, the values of society, along with its heroes and vil-
lains, are constructed in the sport media. The media is also central to sociology of
sport’s long-standing interest in the commercialisation of sport and the construction
of social identity through sport. Interrogation of the media also enables an explora-
tion of the cultural politics of embodiment in sport. The sport media provide a rich
terrain for analysis through the critical perspectives offered by sociology of sport,
and our approach in this book is to show how these connections can be made.
This book will provide a theoretical and methodological framework for analysing
sport in the media. It will demonstrate how to analyse the sport media and provide
examples of analyses as original, researched case studies. At the background of our
analysis is an understanding of the themes of scholarship in sociology of sport. To
make sense of sport in the media, it is necessary to engage with the wealth of litera-
ture that the discipline has produced. Some central preoccupations with the media in
the work of sociologists of sport are described in the following section. We hope this
section will provide a useful guide to making links between the construction of sport
in the media and its significance within the wider society. As indicated previously,

important themes that reoccur in sociology of sport include the relationship between
sport, media and the values of society; sport, media and commercialisation; sport,