Page 65 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

54 • Sport, Media and Society

This chapter builds on the identification of the importance of signifying systems, nar-

rative and genre in making sport meaningful in film by extending these concepts to the

analysis of sport on television. Televised sport can be understood as comprising fi ve
channels of communication, graphics, image, voice, sound effects and music, operating
at the same time to create a narrative or way of knowing sport. Approaches to the analysis

of the five channels of communication are demonstrated and linked to the construction of
sport programmes. Sport is the only type of television programme that globally attracts
more male than female viewers (Cooper-Chen 1994). This chapter considers sport as a
gendered genre, which contains features designed to attract a male audience, while also
employing techniques associated with other types of programming. The case studies for
this chapter are the use of narrative in the televising of the Salt Lake City Winter Olym-
pic spectacle and the televising of men’s and women’s football in the United Kingdom.

Televised Sport and Communicative Excess

The experience of televised sport is one of communicative excess: constantly chang-
ing sounds and images confront the senses; moving bodies are laden with logos;
graphics surround the screen showing player statistics, keeping time and updating
the score. Around the pitch, field or court, the colours and shapes of advertisements

vie with images of the crowd draped in fan paraphernalia. Music is played or sung to
the spectators, who also sing their own songs, and yell and cheer or whistle and boo,
while the voices of commentators overlay a constant narrative on the action. The
sounds of the sport are also present such as players crashing into each other, shout-
ing above the din or running down a court. At the start or end of play, intro and outro
sequences present a collage of images and sounds, and the entire coverage may be
punctuated with advertisements, commercials and station identifi cation breaks.
To analyse television sport, therefore, we need a model of communication that
takes account of all of this activity. In an article on semiotics and television, Seiter
(1992) adapted the work of Christian Metz, originally developed in response to fi lm,
to consider the ways television creates meanings. Seiter (1992) observed that while
semiotic approaches to analysis emphasise the smallest unit of meaning (e.g. the
phoneme in linguistics), television makes it difficult to identify discrete building

blocks of meaning. To ‘freeze’ an image would be to lose the voices, sound effects
and music which may well be occurring simultaneously. Metz (1974) identifi ed fi ve
channels of communication for cinema: image, written language, voice, music and
sound effects. Seiter (1992) suggested that television could also be understood in
these terms, but she substituted graphics for written materials, to include logos, bor-
ders, frames, diagrams and computer-animated images, which, she said, were far
more prevalent on television than in cinema.
Seiter’s approach to characterising communication in television has echoes of

Williams’s (1974) insistence on the importance of ‘flow’ for understanding the