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New Media Sportscapes: Branding and the Internet • 173

a multivocal, intertextual, decentred text. As a result, analysts have argued that ‘on the
web, connectivity matters as much as content’ (Schneider and Foot 2004: 117).

The Pleasures of the Internet

Considering these features, we can ask if there is a different kind of pleasure to be
gained from new media. Kerr, Kücklich and Brereton (2006) have pointed to the
commonly held belief that new media offer more fun than traditional media. They
argued that the pleasure of old media (e.g. a television drama) is seen to derive from

both immersion in a fictional world and an appreciation of textual strategies that
bring it life. However, the characteristics of new media mean that the textual plea-
sures they provide will be different. In traditional media theory, a reader or viewer
is argued to adopt a (human) subject position inscribed in the text. However, with

computer simulation games, the gamers’ pleasure is in their identification with the
computer itself, understanding the logic of the game from the perspective of the

machine (sport games). In addition, new media are not fixed in the same way as

traditional, analogue media. Instead, digital media are in constant flux. The database
form characteristic of much new media enables them to offer a new experience each
time the user engages with them. With traditional media, while you can interpret
them in many ways, what you see is what you get. With new media, each user can
see a different thing, depending on the route he or she navigates through a Web site
or the multimedia components he or she chooses to play.
While the new media may provide new pleasures, and a much wider variety of
voices are to be heard on the Web than in traditional media, other commentators have
been more careful in celebrating the Web as a new egalitarian community. Despite
widened access to the media, Mautner (2005: 821) has argued that ‘web content re-
mains biased against those disadvantaged individuals, groups and communities.’ The
Internet’s capacity to transcend limitations of space and distance has led to it being
seen as a manifestation of globalisation. Yet, while national and cultural boundaries
can seem irrelevant to the Internet, Orgad (2006: 878) has argued that online spaces
do not exist in isolation from social and cultural processes and institutions, pointing

to the way that ‘cyberspace is fundamentally embedded within specific social, cul-
tural and material contexts.’
Writing in 1999, De Moragas showed that only a few countries (United States,
Canada, Japan and Western Europe) accounted for 90 per cent of the world’s In-
ternet use. De Moragas (1999: 5) argued that the inequalities stemmed not from
the Internet, but from the world’s technological and economic inequalities as well
as from the ‘information, content availability and languages used on the Web’. De
Moragas estimated, for example, that written information in English accounted for
60 to 80 per cent of the Web’s content, despite native speakers of English represent-
ing only 8.3 per cent of the world’s population. So, while the new media may have