Page 185 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

174 • Sport, Media and Society

the potential to challenge the dominant cultural order by creating a new multivo-
cal democracy, it is necessary to temper our enthusiasm by attending to the cost of
access to the technologies. Jackson (2001: 349), for example, feared that unequal
access may lead to the ‘construction of enclaves of the technologically plugged-in
surrounded by the plugged out’.

Identity and the Internet

The way the Internet enables individuals to construct identity has also been the sub-
ject of much discussion. Nakamura (2001) summarised the possibilities provided by
the Web for the performance of identity in the following way:
Users of the Internet represent themselves within it solely through the medium of
keystrokes and mouse-clicks, and through this medium they can describe them-
selves and their physical bodies any way they like; they perform their bodies as
text. On the Internet nobody knows that you’re a dog; it is possible to ‘computer
crossdress’ . . . and represent yourself as a different gender, age, race, etc. (p. 226)

Users of the Internet can participate in virtual communities, adopting any identity
they wish. The ability of users to appropriate racial identity, enabling one to ‘co-opt
the exotic and attach it to oneself’ (Nakamura 2001: 230), has led to the practice
of identity tourism in cyberspace. It can be argued that identity tourism (Nakamura
2001) can provide a vacation from fixed, real-world identities and geographical lo-

cales, undermining the ideology of biological essentialism which ties social identity
to physical embodiment.
As a result, if we are to analyse new media, particularly Web sites, it may be
useful to think about the variety of identities and experiences they offer. Consider-
ing the flexibility of identity positions that the Internet presents for users to adopt,

sometimes even asking the user to identify with the computer itself, and the range of
navigation pathways through a Websphere, any analysis needs to take into account
that there will be many ways of reading digital culture. Internet content may change
and be created by multiple authors, including the users of a Web site. Nevertheless,
commercial Web sites are constructed by professionals to create a particular experi-
ence, albeit a malleable one. The growing number and types of sport Web sites are
there to cater for a perceived demand for sport information. Our questions are, there-
fore, how is the sports enthusiast asked to engage in communicative action with the
Web site? What kinds of experiences do sport Web sites offer users?

Analysing Sport Web Sites

Boardman (2005) argued that Web sites had their own language, referring to the sets
of meaningful conventions involving text and audio-visual elements. A consideration
of these conventions will help guide our analysis.