Page 149 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

138 • Sport, Media and Society

effect of discursively positioning them as subjects, sometimes as shoppers, some-
times as commuters, sometimes as tourists. McCarthy (2001) argued that the location
of public televisions constructed subject positions for viewers. Television screens are
a regular feature of many different public places. They can appear in bars and res-
taurants, beside the queue in shops and libraries, in train stations, at bus stops, by
the security guard in public buildings. Their function can range from distraction and
entertainment to information or interdiction. Silent screens showing news channels,
for example, address us as intelligent, busy people interested in current affairs and

world finance. The locations of such screens in airport lounges position the viewer
as a business traveller, rather than a holiday maker. The screens appear above head
height with the sound muted and the subtitles displayed in a clear response to the exi-

gencies of the situation—they need to be out of the way of foot traffic and the noises
of an airport mean that the volume is not an option. Yet these two features also give
the news channels a position of authority to which a viewer must look up, and make
the news a literary event to be read, rather than heard. By contrast, the location of a
giant sport screen in a public park addresses viewers as a community fascinated by
the spectacle of the event.
McCarthy (2001) suggested that some of our earliest images of spectators watch-
ing television in public are groups of wide-eyed and open-mouthed men (and some
women) watching sport shows in bars and taverns. Despite the diverse clientele of
such establishments, McCarthy (2001: 32) argued that a myth arose about the ‘tavern
audience as a masculine, sport-viewing collectivity in the postwar years’. In turn,
this belief that the industry knew its spectators was part of a general cultural anxiety
about working-class leisure patterns. The arrival of television screens in taverns was
viewed as altering the social relations within them. The democratic space of the bar
was argued to be giving way to a commercialised, privatised space, and there were
concerns that televised sport would attract children to bars and detract spectators
from the live game. While watching sport on television at home was thought to make
viewers yearn for the stadium, watching in a bar appeared to offer a preferential
‘live’ experience. McCarthy (2001) suggested that is possible to see the same issues
surrounding the rise of the sports bar. While the tavern was accused of taking from
stadium audiences, sports bars were charged with stealing regular television audi-
ences for sport.

Media Sport in Three Dimensions

McCarthy (2001) offered points of consideration for studying the mediated visual cul-
ture of sport. Firstly, television has a materiality. McCarthy (2001: 118) observed that
those people who would dismiss the television set as just another household appli-
ance fail to understand that ‘appliances, like all commodities, are complicated discur-
sive objects’. Secondly, McCarthy (2001) was interested in the way that televisions