Academic Knowledge of Sports Media - Lecture 1

Defining Sports Media

• The processes, practices, and mediums through which information, messages, and meanings about sport are communicated to and amongst audiences

The Power of Sports

• Sport is a genre of media (just like game shows, soap operas, reality TV) with its own logics, norms, and assumptions

• Sport is a significant form of popular culture (just like art, literature, and music)

• Sport media is reliant on the unique features of sports

  • Uncertainty

  • Competition

  • Physicality

  • Liveness

  • Realness

So What?

• Because of its linkages to media, culture, and identity, through sport we can analyze the operations and relations of power in broader society

Sociology of Sport

• SOCIOLOGY: The study of (human) social practices, experiences, identities, meanings, relations, institutions, processes, and forces, that combine to form a society

  • Sociology of Sport: examines the different aspects of sport as a complex social phenomenon, including (but not restricted to):

    • Sports BODIES

    • Sports PRACTICES

    • Sport PRODUCTS

    • Sport TECHNOLOGIES

    • Sport EXPERIENCES

    • Sport IDENTITIES

    • Sport [SUB]CULTURES

    • Sport ORGANIZATIONS

    • Sport EVENTS

    • Sport SPECTACLES

    • Sport IMAGES

The Importance of Theory

• Society is a complex phenomenon, and there is no singular theory which can explain its complexities

• Some social theories produce more insightful and credible understandings of society than others

• Can be thought of as a lens → the right theory can help you see a phenomenon in an entirely new light

Sociological Imagination

Sociological Imagination provides an extremely useful framework for understanding the relationship between sport and society

The sociological imagination encourages us to identify: the external conditions shaping the nature of society, and the individual lives/bodies of those making up society

Sociological Imagination…

1. Helps people realize the individual and society are interrelated and interdependent

2. What we consider personal experience is a product of broader public forces that enable or constrain our lives, just as what we consider public is a product of particular actions, behaviors, and decisions

3. Each person has the capability to choose how they live their live, but the options from which they choose are shaped by social, historical, cultural, economic, and political forces outside of their control

Back to Sport…

• An SI helps us understand how each person and their sporting experiences are linked to broader societal forces

Sport is always relational meaning that it cannot be fully understood without being placed in relation to the social contexts in which it operates (political, economic, cultural, technological, religious)

• Sport is never static or universal; it is always changing, adapting, and reformulating i response to the societal context around it

Three Approaches to Theorizing Sport

1. The Isolated Thesis - treats sport as an isolated or exclusive entity that is fundamentally separate from the rest of society

2. The reflection thesis - what goes on in sport reflects what goes on in society

3. The dialect thesis - sport is both a reflective productive and active producer of broader society

Quotes

• “A person can consume sports media for hours each day without ever seeing or hearing a sporting event” - Billings, 2014

• “Sports have a vice-like grip on the emotions of the American people. At a time when political involvement is suspect, politicians vilified and the legitimacy of the major social institutions is questioned, sports enthusiasm increases in both scope and intensity. The sportsworld more than any other phenomenon dominates the consciousness and everyday lives of millions of Americans.” - Lipsky, 1979, p. 61

• “Ignoring MediaSport today would be like ignoring the role of the church in the Middle Ages or ignoring the role of art in the Renaissance; large parts of society are immersed in media sports today and virtually no aspect of life is untouched by it.” -Real, 1998, p. 15

• “For in and of itself, [sport] of course is totally meaningless; but, ironically, it is because of its meaninglessness that it can serve such an important
  function for meaning-making. Because of the cultural fragmentation and political polarization that otherwise alienates postmodern lives, sport is more important than ever as a site of social debate and intellectual exploration.” - Serazio, 2019

• “By looking at sports, we can see and critique issues and trends far from the field of play, relating to religion, journalism, digitalization, commerce, celebrity, feminism, masculinity, violence, labor, inequality, militarism, activism, and, of course, identity and community. This is sports' not-so-hidden power.” - Serazio, 2019

• One of the core insights of sociology is that society is socially constructed - Sage, 1998 ; p.3

• Sociological Imagination: “a vivid awareness of the relationship between experience and the wider society” - Mills, C.W.

Tophat

• Lopez (2023) referred to sport as a ___ of media?

  • Genre

• Which thesis do you think is preferred by scholars?

  • Dialect Thesis

Contextualizing Sports Media

How we will study sports media

• A sporting sociological imagination can be “done” by interpreting the sporting world through adopting a:

  1. CRITICAL Approach

  2. HISTORICAL Approach

  3. CULTURAL Approach

  4. STRUCTURAL Approach

Media Literacy Must-Haves for Today’s Business Leaders

• Critical Thinking

• Informed Decision Making

• Effective Communication

• Avoiding Misinformation

• Building Trust

• Staying Current

• Navigating Controversy

• Empowering Teams

A Critical Approach

A critical approach means

• Questioning your assumptions

• Challenging those things that you take for granted

• Wrestling with ideas and concepts which you may not be comfortable

• Considering context that you previously may have overlooked

First step in finding ways to improve our society, our lives, and our world

A Denaturalizing Act

• An uncritical approach naturalized

  • views things as automatic, normal, part of nature, “just the way things are…”

• Naturalizing social phenomenon obscures their relational nature, and disregards how they are products of social, cultural, historical contexts

• A critical approach denaturalized

  • Makes the connections to how certain things are products of specific social contexts at a specific point in time

Historical Approach

Any society - and aspect of that society - is the product of long-term historical processes and changes

It is important to recognize that to understand our “[sporting] present, we must understand our [sporting] past.”

Sport as a Pedagogy

Pedagogy: regarding teaching or education

• Sport itself has historically been deployed as a pedagogy

  • Teaching through sport how to optimize one’s life, health, vitality and, more importantly, the life, health, and vitality of the nation

• Sport was deployed to teach individuals the morals and values considered to be proper*

  • *as defined by those in power

  • Discipline, respect for authority, vitality, adherence to class norms

Collective, sport was used to strengthen the nation while also maintaining the dominant social order

History as a Contested Terrain

History is not just a fixed set of facts and stories that are immune to change

History is an active contest between different groups, of different levels of power, to define collective memory

Cultural Approach

CULTURE: Two Interrelated Elements

1. A set of Practices

   • The things we do within our everyday lives

2. A System of Meanings

   • The values, idea, and beliefs (the ideologies) of society

Through these interrelated cultural elements, we learn the norms, rules, and expectations of the society in which we live

Societies have their own social/political/economic histories and therefore, their own cultural sets of practices and meanings

• Sport practices and meanings derived from their own social/political/economic histories

A cultural sensibility avoids ethnocentrism

• viewing one’s own culture as more central/important and, hence, superior to others

Structural Approach

Sociology has a classic “debate” between structure and agency

• Structure = structural theories believe that society shapes and molds the behavior of individuals within it

  • Society → Individual

    • Rules

• Agency = Agency theories believe that individuals create society out of their everyday interactions

  • Society ← Individual

    • Freedom

Sporting Hegemonies

• Something is hegemonic if it is unquestioned, taken for granted, viewed as being natural or normal: the “way things are and should be”

• As normalized and naturalized, the broader societal forces, influences, and relations contributing to the “way things are” are rarely acknowledged and rarely challenged

Naturalization reinforces and thus normalizes that status quo by obscuring the clear understanding of social context

It can therefore be argued that contemporary sport - and especially sports media - is a naturalizing institution

The Importance of Context

Sport (in all its forms) is a:

• societal construct whose form and function is a product of (and simultaneously) produces the society in which it is situated

• relational and contextual rather than fixed, essential, natural, or universal

With our sociological imagination, the point of this class to contextualize sports and sports media

Contextualize (for our purpose)

• To forge an understanding of sport’s wider societal inter-relationships, and interdependencies

• Helps us develop a more holistic understanding of sport and a better understanding of contemporary society

The dominant forms and modes of sport and physical culture always reflect what is dominant within broader social context

With our sociological imagination, this class with denaturalize sport and sports media by contextualizing it

Contextualize: Forging an understanding of sport’s wider social interrelationships, and interdependencies, develops both a more holistic understanding of sport and a better understanding of contemporary society

The Jigsaw as Society Analogy - An individual piece of a jigsaw is a relatively meaningless in and of itself… it can only be understood in relation to the other pieces that combine to make the jigsaw as a whole

Quotes 2

• “Sociology is something that you do, not something you ONLY read” - Erving Goffman

• “Being critical does not necessarily mean that you have to provide a negative view of whatever you are investigating. On the contrary, being critical means that you do not take things, ideas, and general assumptions for granted” -Molnar and Kelly

• “It is crucial to think about how sports media and the genre of sports intersect with hegemonic power… The sense that sports show people, events, institutions, and ideas “as they are” makes ideologies contained within sports media seem authentic, natural, and immutable. As sports and sports media are part of and contribute to the wider cultural complex, they validate ideologies widely present in society” -Lopez

• “The Great Sports Myth (GSM) is the widespread ‘belief in the inherent purity and goodness of sport’… It holds that participants, consumers, and communities involved all benefit from sports. When negative outcomes emerge from sport, the GSM entails that its origins are ‘individuals blinded by greed, fame, or an extreme desire to win as they play, coach, manage, or own teams and events’” - Lopez

• “criticism is actually a form of commitment, a way of saying: if there are problems here and unwarranted breaches of social justice and human equality, let’s identify them and work to transform things to make sport better” - Sage

• “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past” - George Orwell

• “each culture must be understood and interpreted on their own terms, not judged in relation to others” - Molnar and Kelly

• “The operation of particular historical agents [individuals]… can be adequately understood only within a broader structural context” - E. Willis

Tophat 2

• In 1998, Sage (p. 11) stated: “By and large, Americans are not encouraged to critically examine the prevalent attitudes, values, myths, and folklore about sport” (p. 11). Over 25 years later, do you think Sage’s statement is true?

  • Opinion Based - No wrong answer

• With a partner discuss the Great Sports Myth

  • The belief that sport is pure and media ruins the purity of it