Page 37 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

26 • Sport, Media and Society

individual’s embodied, passionate investment in ideas and events that may not be
easily understood, articulated or even rationalised in a cognitive sense.
Affect is a term that has been used in different ways by psychologists and sociolo-
gists to refer generally to the emotions. However, we need to distinguish between
affect and emotion. Drawing on the work of Tomkins, Wissinger (2007) proposed

an understanding of affect as specific physiological responses to stimuli which may
or may not translate into emotions. Wissinger (2007: 232) argued that ‘affect pre-
cedes emotions; affect is not conscious.’ The concept of affect understood in this

way can help illuminate the forces that flow between bodies and between bodies
and technologies in the case of media sport. Affect can also be thought of as social,
a contagious energy that binds people together in intimate relationships or social
groups. The classic sociologist Durkheim (1966: 4), for example, was interested in
the movements of feeling in crowds that ‘do not originate in any one of the particular
individual consciousnesses’.
In this sense, an understanding of affect asks us, in Hardt’s (2007: ix) terms, ‘to
enter the realm of causality’ and think about our capacity to affect our environment
and be affected by it. However, as Wissinger (2007) observed, the effects of affect are
not predictable or reducible to a single stimulus. Wissinger (2007) gave the example of
the power of music to affect the body in multiple ways—the same piece may make

some people dance or sing, cause some to leave the dance floor and send others to
sleep. Affect is always dynamic, and the concept requires a rethinking of the body’s
relationship to representation.
Mediated sport often involves a mix of sounds, text and images. Media theory sug-
gests that these images, words, sounds and symbols are woven together into narratives
for the audience to understand. Once the audience has understood the narrative, they
can be said to have stepped into the subject position constructed by the narrative.
Yet mediated sport involves an array of signification that can move too quickly to be

grasped consciously all at once—imagine an opening sequence of a sports show with
a montage of staged and live action, overlaid by graphics and accompanied by music,
sound effects and voices. Yet, despite the speed of delivery, mediated sport can have
an immediate impact on the audience, and any or all of the sounds and images may
generate affects, whether the audience is consciously aware of them or not, ‘leaving
impulses, intensities, and perhaps actions in their wake’ (Wissinger 2007: 258 n. 13).
Analysis of the sport media often involves a slowing down of the flow of the various

channels of communication to investigate what they contain.
Wissinger’s (2007) focus was the work of fashion models, which, she argued,
involves affective labour. Modelling work manipulates affect by capturing and chan-
nelling attention. A model’s allure lies outside the realm of consciousness or ra-
tionality. What constitutes the right look at any moment cannot be articulated, so
that successful models need to cultivate a chameleon-like appearance to change at
the whim of the industry. Having the right look means generating an affective re-
sponse. It is possible to overlay this response with a narrative meaning, for example,