Page 18 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Introduction: Interacting with Media Sport • 7

Reading Sport: Critical Essays on Power and Representation and Wenner’s (1998)
MediaSport. These texts will help introduce those new to studying the sport media
to the wealth of existing research, providing resources to complement the analytic
approaches developed here. The unique contribution of this book lies in its develop-
ment of a ‘sociological imagination’ around the sport media by critically refl ecting
on the many aspects of the audio-visual culture of sport. It encourages an approach

to analysis that takes account of the specificity of the many facets of the sport media.
It considers the sport media as inherently interactive. Mediated sport interacts with
the politics of society; it interacts with its audience; it interacts with the wider visual
culture in which it is embedded; and it is interactive through developments in new
technologies. In using the book, students and researchers are encouraged to inter-
act with its content to frame their own independent analysis of media sport. In this
way, the book provides a means to explore the dynamic interplay of power politics
in media sport by working through original case studies, making connections and
demonstrating the steps of analysis. As such, it will provide the basis for launching
an independent enquiry into the sport media.
At the heart of the book is a conceptualisation of the relationship between sport,
media and society as a series of interactions: interactions between the audience and
the content of media sport; interactions between sport, media and social identities;
and interactions made increasingly possible through new technologies. The book

focuses on the diverse forms of media sport—film, TV, newspapers, magazines, ad-
vertisements, three-dimensional media environments and the Internet—developing
skills of analysis appropriate to each one. Each chapter builds on the theoretical and
methodological insights of the previous chapters, resulting in a complete toolkit for
analysing the sport media. Extended case studies, drawn from both the United King-
dom and the United States, are featured in every chapter. The case studies, based on
original research, demonstrate a detailed application of concepts and analytical tech-
niques. The focus on worked examples enables students to appreciate the complex
interplay of cultural politics within the sport media, showing how gender, race, class
and national identity are encoded into the fabric of media sport, often in shifting and
ambiguous ways.
The first chapter, ‘Analysing Media Sport’, takes the reader through a range of

techniques for the analysis of media sport, explaining their theoretical contexts and
the contributions of key thinkers such as Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes, Mi-
chel Foucault and Stuart Hall. The chapter considers the sport media as collections
of signs, as discourses and as affects. A semiotic approach to making sense of words
and images in the sport media is demonstrated as a series of steps of analysis. Dis-
course analysis is presented as the utilisation of a series of concepts—the statement,
discursive formation, intertextuality—to illuminate meaning in media sport. Finally,
the power of mediated sport to move us bodily is explored through the concept of
affect, which is introduced as way of analysing the nonrepresentational impact of
media sport.