Page 15 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

4 • Sport, Media and Society

(1949) lamented the loss of the play element of modern sport in the face of increas-
ing professionalisation. From a neo-Marxist perspective, Rigauer (1981) argued that
sport has become the mirror image of work, so that achievement is the motivat-
ing principle for both top-level sportspeople and the labour force. Brohm (1978)
echoed this view of sport, suggesting that an athlete is prepared for competition like
a racehorse, creating monsters and machines that had internalised the principle of
maximum productivity. As a result, the athlete is as much alienated from sport as the
worker is from his labour: ‘even his body no longer belongs to him: it belongs to sci-
ence’ (Brohm 1978: 107). Brohm (1978) charged the sport media with assaulting the
hearts and minds of the masses with ideology that functions as an opiate to distract
the people from social change.
The sport media can be seen as an expression of the commercialisation of sport
in its entertainment style, its emphasis on goals and spectacles and its construc-
tion of performers as celebrities. Sport and its audience are sold as commodities to
advertisers—the high price of the advertising slots during major sport events is based
on the capacity of sport to reach millions of potential consumers for any number of
products. Associations with sport can add the ‘fun factor’ (Kellner 2003: 3) to any
aspect of the economy, even banks and insurance companies. The sport media is part
of the commercialisation of sport, but it can also make commercialisation its subject

matter. Hollywood films such as North Dallas Forty (1979), Jerry Maguire (1996)
and Any Given Sunday (1999) contain scenes which depict the ravages of commerci-
alised, professional sport on the bodies and souls of the athletes. These fi lms remain
products of the entertainment industry they ostensibly critique, however, so that the
narrative resolution presents little challenge to the established order of sport.

Sport, Media and Social Identity

A great deal of research has focused on the way sport, and in many cases, mediated
sport, contributes to collective and personal identity formation. The gendering of the
sport media—the way that men’s sport dominates and women’s sport is sidelined—
has attracted much attention from scholars. Critics have argued that this inequitable
coverage has the effect of symbolically annihilating women’s sporting accomplish-
ments. In addition, when women’s sport is shown, it is often trivialised and sexu-
alised, undermining its power (Kane and Greendorfer 1994). However, gender is
not just constructed in the mediation of women’s sport—the sport media can be
understood as a powerful site for the reproduction of masculinity. The sport media

does not simply reflect gender difference, but constructs differences by engaging
the audience in terms of what Hargreaves (1994) called masculine- and feminine-
appropriate sports. As Whannel (2007: 16) observed, an image of a sport star, such
as David Beckham, involves ‘a range of audience expectations and mobilises and
speaks to a range of identities’. Whannel (2007: 16) considered that the fi lm Bend
It Like Beckham (2002) was successful because it drew on tensions between the