Page 168 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Sport, Media and Visual Culture • 157

Crowds were ordered through entrances; even the restrooms had in and out en-
trances to help organise people. Lines for food and drink were less structured, al-
though the fans seemed to impose order on themselves.
The fans engaged in the events of the game in a range of ways. Some dutifully
followed the play, completing the scorecard, while others talked to each other, ig-
noring much of the game. Couples (lesbian and heterosexual) sat with their arms
around each other, kissing and holding hands. A fan for the visiting team, the Texas
Rangers, was teased, ‘T is for time to go home.’ Many spectators wore team shirts of

current and past players. Some fans altered the official shirts or wore homemade
ones. One had former player Johny Damon’s shirt with masking tape over the name
(former Boston hero Damon transferred to the Red Sox’ most hated rivals, the New
York Yankees). Fans smuggled in illegal food, used banned language, performed
the ‘wave’, shouted rude comments to visiting players, got in each other’s way and
even fell asleep. They also cooperated—passing food and money down when fans
purchased food from vendors, singing and chanting together and adjusting to allow
people to leave and return to their seats.
The events, sights, sounds and smells of game day were in part orchestrated by
the franchise to create an overwhelming Red Sox presence before, during and after
the game. The permeation of media throughout the spaces within and beyond the
stadium was designed to create a particular image of the Red Sox and Fenway Park
to sustain its popularity and appeal to current and potential fans. While strategies
are employed to organise and control consumer behaviour and deliver a consistent
and expected event, fans engage with the happenings and with each other in a range

CHAPTER SUMMARY
• We are surrounded by the visual culture of sport, and our analysis of media
sport needs to take account of this three-dimensional experience
• Media sport has materiality when it takes the form of objects and performa-
tivity when the objects are given meanings in use
• The different locations of television screens in public spaces create ways

for the contemporary flâneur to engage with the spectacle of sport
• The sport museum mediates meanings of sport, discursively constructing
ways of knowing our sporting past and present
• Analysis of the technologies of display, interpretation and layout and
their role in effecting meanings can illuminate the way a museum frames
sport
• Sport organisations use strategies to manage the fan experience through
manipulating the visual culture of sport, while fans use tactics of creative
consumption, making their own use of the mediated experience of sport