Page 181 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

170 • Sport, Media and Society

for advertising . . . for government . . . and the articulation of the self’ (Mautner 2005:
812). Digital technologies have had a major impact on traditional media, changing
existing practices and extending possibilities. Trend (2001: 1) argued that mediation

is now one of the defining characteristics of the new digital culture, ‘an age in which
cyberspace has transformed much of material culture into a vaporous cloud of signal
and code’.
Sport is a central part of the new media, becoming ‘one of the most important
thematic areas on the internet’ (de Moragas 1999: 18). Changes are happening fast as
more and more people are growing accustomed to the new media: http://www.ESPN.
com, for example, received 18.8 million hits in September 2005, 21 per cent more
than in the previous year (Richard K. Miller and Associates 2006: 64). It is essential,
therefore, that any contemporary analysis of media sport take account of the Internet
and its associated technologies. Critical media analysts have begun to identify ways
that the new medium differs from the old, and these insights can be applied to the
transformation of sport via the Internet.

The Characteristics of the New Media

The first stage in an analysis of the Internet is to reflect on its distinctive characteris-

tics. Research on digital culture has stressed certain qualities that belong to the new
media. These can be summarised as multimodality, permanence and ephemerality,
unboundedness, intertextuality, multilinearity and multivocality. These features will
be considered in turn.

Multimodality

Commentators such as Trend (2001: 53) have echoed MacLuhan’s (1964) obser-
vation that ‘the content of any new medium is frequently the old medium that it
replaces’. A perusal of sport Web sites will confirm that they are a distinctive assem-

blage of a range of familiar media: written texts, animation, music, radio and live or
recorded television and video. In addition, a Web site may be a digital version of a
printed magazine, newspaper or fanzine, reconfi guring existing formats for the new
media. The Web is, therefore, a multimedia space, yet it is this defining feature that

has been most neglected in analysis (Pauwels 2005; Mautner 2005). Words are im-
portant signifiers on the Web, but so, too, are graphics, colours, sounds and move-

ment. In addition, technological interfaces with the Internet can range from keyboard
and mouse to touch screens and voice recognition. The Internet, therefore, enables
different modes of interaction. Referring to these features, Mautner (2005: 821) has
argued that ‘the unique semiotic potential of the web creates new challenges for the
analysis of multimodality.’