Page 148 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Sport, Media and Visual Culture • 137

The things that we relate to have embodied within them the social relations that
gave rise to them through their design, the work of producing them, their prior
use, the intention to communicate through them and their place within an existing
cultural system of objects (Dant, 1999: 2).

Objects have a context; they become meaningful as people use them and give them
meaning. For Rose (2007: 220), this can be understood as their performative dimen-
sion. An object or image ‘may have a range of potential meanings, but they are latent
until mobilized in a specific context’. As they engage with visual culture, individu-

als themselves come into being through their use of things. Rose (2007) gave the
example of a person gazing at a painting in an art gallery. Only in this context does
the painting become art and the person a connoisseur. What we do with things, the
way we display them, store them, archive them and catalogue them, gives them the
meaning they have. The arrangement of sporting objects in a museum display or a
shop window can construct them as interesting curiosities, objects to revere or de-
sirable possessions. Simultaneously, the person responsible for the arrangement is
constructed as a museum curator or a window dresser, and the onlooker as a cultured
museum visitor or a shopper. In this sense, the object can be understood as a perfor-
mance, resulting in the ‘co-constitution of image and observer’ (Rose 2007: 220).

Ambient Television Sport

It is possible to see this dual concern with the materiality and performative dimen-
sions of the media object in McCarthy’s (2001) study of televisions located outside of
the home. McCarthy (2001: 1) was interested in analysing televisions placed within
the public sphere: ‘the store, the waiting room, the bar, the train station, the airport’.
Her aim was to trace how the positioning and meanings attached to television in
public places ‘blend with the social conventions and power structures of its locale’
(McCarthy 2001: 2). This kind of cultural geography of the city draws on Benjamin’s

(1983) reflections of the figure of the flâneur in nineteenth-century Paris.

Benjamin was fascinated by the metropolis, writing a series of refl ections on
European cities in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1927, he began an analysis of the Pa-
risian shopping arcades in the nineteenth century, called the ‘Passagenarbeit’, or
‘Arcades Project’. The project was not finished in his lifetime and remains a col-

lection of notes, drafts and quotations (see http://www.othervoices.org/gpeaker/Pas
sagenwerk.php). A long section is concerned with the writings of the poet Charles
Baudelaire. Benjamin was interested in a figure from Baudelaire’s poetry, the fl âneur,

the gentleman of leisure strolling through Paris. The flâneur’s deliberate distancing

of himself from the crowds allowed him to perceive the city as a spectacle of delights
for his entertainment.
Like the flâneur, contemporary consumers are presented with a series of spectacles

as they traverse the city. Signs, screens, events and window displays all have the