Page 31 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

20 • Sport, Media and Society

this clear. The apparently self-evident ‘truth’ of sport as a masculine enterprise is
repeatedly illustrated by the absence of gender marking. For example, in profes-
sional basketball in the United States, the women’s professional league is gender
marked as the Women’s National Basketball Association and stands in contrast to
the unmarked National Basketball Association, indicating the obviousness of men’s
association with the sport. The social effect of this truth-claim is to grant men’s sport
greater legitimacy, reinforcing their access to greater resources and media airtime as
a matter of course. This becomes understood as common sense and, as such, appears
impossible to question. These gaps or silences indicate that what is left out can have
as powerful an effect as what is present.
Foucault (1972) considered discourse to be made up of groups of ‘statements’.
Statements can be thought of as those ‘utterances which have some institutional force
and which are thus validated by some form of authority’ (Mills 1997: 55) and which
thereby claim to speak the truth. Thus it is possible to differentiate between discourse
as a whole and individual discourses or groups of statements. The valorisation of
‘playing hurt’ could be thought of as a statement that forms a part of the broader dis-
course of sporting masculinity. Putting one’s body at risk is celebrated and rewarded
as appropriate, tough, masculine behaviour in sport.
Discourses and statements incorporate spoken and written words, images, ges-
tures and practices. Analysis of all of these elements is necessary to understand the
discourses underpinning media sport. The concept of intertextuality is useful for cap-
turing the accumulation of meaning across different texts or images. Any individual
utterance (a word, an image, a gesture) always evokes previous associations with that
utterance. When we see an image of a snowboarder in an advertisement for a dry,

financial product, for example, instances of similar images we have encountered
are inevitably recalled, affording the bank or lending company some of the fun and
youthfulness associated with these so-called lifestyle sports.
Patterns of representation, where images or words are positioned in similar ways
again and again, can be understood as discursive formations. The way champion
athletes are repeatedly pictured kissing their medal or trophy can be thought of as a

discursive formation. Discursive formations can be identified whenever ‘one can de-
fine a regularity (an order, correlations, positions and functionings, transformations)’

(Foucault 1972: 38). These discursive formations also serve as a focus of intertextu-
ality in that meanings are constructed in relationship with a host of previous associa-
tions of a text.
An understanding of the media as discursive was central to Hall’s (1980) infl u-
ential encoding–decoding model of media communication. Van Zoonen (1994) sug-
gested that Hall’s work, originally published as part of a series of Working Papers
in Cultural Studies by the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the Univer-
sity of Birmingham, and later as an edited volume, Culture, Media, Language (Hall,
Hobson, Lowe and Willis 1980), contributed to a paradigm shift in communication