Page 150 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Sport, Media and Visual Culture • 139

communicate as objects by studying where the TV set is located in a public space
like a restaurant, a retail store or an airport. She argued that ‘tracing its physical re-
lationship to other signs and objects, can tell us something about the parameters that

are defined for public personhood in such spaces’ (McCarthy 2001: 119). Finally,
McCarthy highlighted the different modes of address that can be encompassed by
the positioning of television screens in public. The visual culture of sport provides

opportunities for official, mass spectatorship and more intimate, un offi cial viewing.
McCarthy (2001) discussed the giant TV images at a baseball game as well as her
observations of New York Yankees fans attending a baseball game in the stadium
while watching a live basketball game on portable TVs.
The mediation of sport is performed though a combination of two-dimensional
images and three-dimensional visual displays. Media sport embraces the objects,
places and spaces of sport. Sport museums bring together texts, objects, images and
sounds of sport and arrange them according to a logic of display. Porter (1996) ar-
gued that by ‘reading’ the museum, it is possible to make sense of the many layers
of meaning that reside in

the exhibition themes; the physical layout of space and design; the sources and
choices of objects, images, texts and other materials; the position, condition
and presentation of these elements; the lights, movements, sounds and smells cre-
ated in the exhibition. (p. 114)

Porter (1996) also observed that meaning was made at the point where visitors
enter the exhibition. The way visitors move around the space of the museum, the
expectations they bring with them and the way they engage with the exhibits is all
part of the production of the exhibition. The next section considers ways to unpack
the mediation of sport through museum displays.

The Sport Museum

Sport museums mediate meanings of sport, constructing perspectives for the masses
on what is valuable and interesting about sport through the display of artefacts. The
‘exhibitionary complex’ (Bennett 1995: 59) has the effect of ordering, not just the
objects on display, but the public who come to inspect them. As Dicks (2003: 146)
put it, ‘museums are powerful agencies for defining culture to the public, and for the

public to define itself through the viewing relations they embody.’
In tracing the history of the museum, Bennett (1995) showed that museums in the

nineteenth century reflected a connection between the new techniques of display and
the principles of classification found in emerging disciplines: history, art history,

archaeology, geology, biology and anthropology. In contrast to the private, chaotic