Page 33 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

22 • Sport, Media and Society

and imposed is through the use of combinations of texts. This can have the effect
of limiting the potential range of meanings which might have been available. For
example, images on their own can be very ambiguous, but in newspapers, the words
that accompany photographs guide the reader in deciphering the picture.
During the Sydney 2000 Olympics, a photograph appeared in the British news-
paper The Independent depicting two black women, one sitting cross-legged looking
like she was about to cry, the other crouching next to her with a comforting arm
around her shoulder. In itself, the photograph could have multiple meanings, but there
are clues within the photograph that limit those meanings: both women were wearing
uniforms, indicating they were athletes, one Australian and the other British, and the
reader might have recognised the seated athlete as the Australian runner Cathy Free-
man. Given this interpretation, a reader might have read the image as being a scene
at the end of a race, but the outcome of the race is not immediately clear, given Free-
man’s disconsolate appearance. The written text above the image, however, directed
the reader to make sense of the potential meanings of the photograph along specifi c
lines. The words ‘Olympic Games’ appeared as a header to the page, asking us to
understand the image as related to this international event. The headline over the
image read ‘Freeman Heals Pains of a Fractured Nation’. The athlete was confi rmed
as Cathy Freeman, and despite the ambiguous signs in the image, the word heals
indicated that the result of the race was positive for her. The reader was asked to in-
terpret the look of distress on Freeman’s face in the context of the ethnic tensions in
Australia—because of her identity as an aboriginal Australian, her victory was seen
as symbolically bringing together aboriginal and white Australian communities.
Making sense of the words required the body of Cathy Freeman to be decoded in
a particular way. The audience was provided with a preferred meaning and asked to

adopt a specific position in relation to the text. The construction of meaning became a
dynamic process where the audience was addressed by the newspaper’s words and

pictures, and in response, they adopted a specific reading position to understand what
was being portrayed. As a result, it is important to consider not only what is being
represented in the sport media, but also the way the audience is positioned by those
representations. In this way, we can think of the audience as becoming part of the
discourse of the sport media—subject to its meanings and defi nitions.

Analysing the Spectacle of Sport II:
the Discourse of Stargazing

Racing hearts were the order of the day in Madrid on Tuesday as David Beckham
had his Real Madrid medical examination under the intense gaze of excited nurses
and anxious club dignitaries ... As if the moving hands of time wanted to signal a

prodigiously fit sportsman’ ability to last the span of a soccer contest, Beckham’s
medical test ran to fully 90 minutes.