Page 147 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

136 • Sport, Media and Society

Guy Debord (1994) claimed that we live in a society of the spectacle, referring the
importance of the field of vision in making the world meaningful to us. Contemporary

culture foregrounds visual experiences: we interact with visual texts and signs, we are
stimulated and entertained by still and moving images, and we are surrounded by objects
and places designed to be seen and appreciated in three dimensions. Technologies allow
us to see more and more: endoscopic medical procedures are able to image the inside of
the body, surveillance cameras monitor people without their knowledge, and biometric
devices are able to identify people by scanning the retina of the eye. It is possible to say,
therefore, that we live within a very visual culture, and imagery associated with sport has
begun to permeate more and more aspects of our lives.
Media sport is not confined to watching the game on television, or reading about it

in a newspaper or magazine. Advertisements on billboards pepper our cities’ transport
networks, featuring sports stars or sports images in association with all manner of goods
and services. Big screens are erected in public spaces to show sports events, sports shows
sell televisions in shop windows, portable video game consoles let you play simulated
sport on the go, and passers-by are regularly adorned with the logos of sports clothing
brands. Going to a live sport event entails engagement with a variety of mediated sport
experiences, including the programmes, newspapers and scorecards you collect on the
way, the advertisements in the shops and bars you pass by, the logo on the ticket you
show, the big screen in the stadium and the advertisements on the scoreboard. While
the majority of these experiences are dominated by the visual, they also intersect with
other sensory experiences, like touch, smell, taste and hearing as in: drinking a beer in
a cup emblazoned with the logo of your team, smelling the food of the people behind
you, feeling the heat of the sun, and listening to the crowd singing. Watching a game is
a visual spectacle, but the total experience is also an intersensory one.

Materiality and Performativity

There is no shortage of objects that we can associate with media sport. Cars, balls,
shoes, bags, toys, replica team shirts, mobile phones, all resonate with meanings,
discourses and mythologies constructed through the sport media and within adver-
tising campaigns. Often they remain imprinted with logos, traces of the global, and
the media-driven economy of consumer capitalism. A Chelsea soccer shirt, for exam-
ple, is a media object: it retains its links to the team’s media celebrities that are seen
wearing it, and it carries three logos, media signifiers of the club and its sponsors:

SAMSUNG MOBILE written across the chest, the circular Chelsea Football Club
logo above the left breast, and a smaller Adidas logo underneath the collar. But the
shirt is not simply a representation. It has three dimensions: it is an item that exists in
the world in a concrete form; it combines imagery with physicality; and, its weight
and volume, the way it looks and feels, its shape and texture. Rose (2007: 219) sug-
gested that these sensual qualities of the object can be understood as their ‘material-

ity’. Objects, however, are not simply material things, they are reflections of the wider
lives of communities and individuals. People have social relationships with things: