Page 161 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

150 • Sport, Media and Society

modern public sphere, the way that work and leisure were allocated times and spaces
within ‘the built environment of the colony and metropole’ (Chua 2007: 12). Stadia
in this account can be understood as repositiories of memories of the past.
Mehretu’s triptych Stadia combines elements of the nineteenth-century Pana-
thinaiko Olympic Stadium and the Wukesong Olympic Cultural and Sports Cen-
ter, which, at the time, was being built for the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing. A

circular field is discernible at the centre of the paintings, but Chua (2007) argued that
the gaze is drawn elsewhere, to the visual activities in the surroundings:

In Stadia, the eye’s habits are guided by the force of sensuality. The stray marks
in the center of the field interest us only in the way we’re told to watch the spec-

tacle that has been staged for us in the center of the arena. What is as interesting
is everything that is happening in the stands as well. There is a disorienting force
created by a clash of gestures: the shapes that resemble banners that occupy part
of the foreground of the painting, the marks that seem to explode in uncountable
directions across the edges of the stadium, the counter-structures that form on its
periphery and in its very center. (p. 14)

Mehretu’s layered imagery conjures up a host of historical and geographical
connotations of the architectural spaces of stadia. Stadia, according to Chua (2007:
15), provide places where ‘members of a nation, an empire, or a community can
recognize one another physically, bounded by time and space’. The spectacle of sport
in the space of the stadium resounds with meanings constructed by its mediation
through multiple sensory channels. Within the three-dimensional spaces of sport,
meaning is made both through the architecture and people’s engagement with the
resulting structure.

De Certeau and the Practice of Everyday Life

The work of the sociologist de Certeau is useful to explain the active part played by
the consumer in making sense of the places he or she encounters in everyday life. De
Certeau (1984) was interested in what consumers did with the products of capitalist
society. He argued that it is not enough to study, for example, images broadcast on
television, but it is also necessary to think about what cultural consumers make or
do with these images. De Certeau (1984: xii) tried to avoid the passive connotations
inherent in some accounts of consumption and considered consumers to be creative
users of cultural products, including ‘urban space, the products purchased in the su-
permarket, the stories and legends distributed by the newspapers, and so on’. In this
sense, consumption can be understood as another stage in the production of mean-
ing. De Certeau (1984: xiii) argued that the task for analysis was to illuminate the
manipulation of culture by ‘users who are not its makers’.