Assessing the sociology of sport: On the mediasport interpellation and commodity narratives

Trajectories

The early trajectories of media in sport studies and sport in media studies reveal a tale of two nascent and insecure disciplines, both encumbered by academic reputations that needed bolstering, reluctant to dip their toes in the water of the other for fear of weakening their cases for legitimacy (Wenner, 1998b). The push for “scientization” in physical education and the preoccupation with measuring “serious” social effects (e.g., propaganda, violence, children) in media research stifled studying the popular—media in sport studies and sport in media studies—for some time.

With the rise of British cultural studies, sport and media studies gained “permission” to engage one other without apology. As the study of sport and media advanced, recognition of their symbiosis became so fundamental that neologisms such as “mediasport” (Wenner, 1998b) were created. In this fusion, many scholars saw a cultural power greater than the sum of its parts. Mediasport merges two of Althusser’s (1971/2001) ideological state apparatuses in a way that wields considerable influence by masking its force in twin pleasures of sport and media consumption (Wenner, 2013b). Following Althusser, essential reasons for studying the dynamics of the mediasport mix are that (1) “in its contemporary hypercommodified form, the ideological contours and ethical sensibilities of the mediasportscape dominate the cultural meanings that are associated with sport,” and (2) “as it fulfills its market roles, mediasport strategically reaches out to us to narrate understandings of sport in the context of broader social relations” (Wenner, 2013b: 83–84).

Indeed, concerns over cultural power undergird bottom line findings about sport and its “mediatization” (Frandsen, 2014). This preoccupation can be seen as study advanced in three core areas of communication inquiry: (1) senders/institutions/production/encoding; (2) messages/content/texts/representation/signification; and (3) receivers/audiences/fandom/consumption/decoding. Further, as distilled in recent stocktakings (Rowe, 2014; Wenner, 2015) of mediasport research within the sociology of sport, one may synopsize the area’s predominant concerns as (1) “money and power” (i.e., commercialization, advertising, mega-events/spectacle, globalization, celebrity) and (2) “framing and identities” (i.e., gender/sex, race/ethnicity, ability/disability, national/local).

In considering the “power balance” in mediasport and its abilities to cast cultural shadows, we know that mediated sport consumption can bring abundant pleasure and significance for audiences. Here, there is considerable capacity to ignite resourcefulness, and to re-appropriate meaning, often in resistance to institutional narratives. Nonetheless, if one steps back to examine what underlies much mediasport research, concerns over the prospects for meaningful agency in the face of the mediasport cultural complex are considerable. Indeed, for many, the weight of findings about the sport–media nexus symbolize much about what is wrong with sport today: its globalization, corporatization, and commodification; its reliance on spectacle, mega-events, and celebrity; its tendencies to reinforce dominant cultural ideologies; and its powers to essentialize and naturalize difference through characterizations of nation, race, gender, and other identities.

Challenges

I often make the case for studying mediasport within the sociology of sport by asserting “the frame is more important than the game” (Wenner, 2006: 55). This is part hyperbole designed to disrupt sport-centered thinking and advance media on the agenda of the sociology of sport. Still, there is much truth in the claim. The “story” of sport, the explanations of its meaning and importance, may be far more culturally significant than the mounting of sport or the results of competition. Admittedly, the story of sport is told in many quarters. The voices of participants, spectators, functionaries, and many others articulate stories. Still, the relevance of Gerbner’s refrain that “those people who tell most of the stories most of the time control a culture” (see Morgan, 2002) is obvious for the meaningful study of sport in culture. The simple answer concerning who tells most of the stories most of the time about sport is the media. Accordingly, disproportionate amounts of mediasport inquiry have focused on messages, content, texts, representations, and signification.

A ready pragmatic force fuels this fire. We often do the “easy stuff” first in clearing pathways to expedite scholarly careers. Textual analysis avoids the challenges of gaining access to study the organizations and workers who produce mediasport and is less cumbersome than doing systematic audience study. Yet, this structural imbalance persists in mediasport inquiry. In some areas, we need to reassess our gains. For example, our often-reproduced findings about the constancy of gender and racial inequities in media coverage have reached a point where we need to better connect dots to other parts of the communicative process. We need to better understand the organizational and professional cultures as well as market pressures that produce systematic biases, stereotypes, and exclusion. We need more insight about how different kinds of audiences are reading, embracing, and resisting such entrenched tendencies.

Simply put, connecting the dots, always an underlying concern of Hall’s (1973) encoding/decoding model, remains a central challenge in mediasport research. As well, often overlooked is an important “part of the story” about the “telling of the story” of sport as it has been institutionalized in embedded proclivities of media. We need to better contextualize our deconstructions of the stories being told with increased sophistication about the omnipresent commodity context (Wenner, 2013a). In tandem, we need to give more attention to the form of address that is being used—consistently, strategically, and powerfully—to hail us. I argue that there is a surprisingly constant character to the hailing in media that aids and abets telling, and naturalizing, the tale of sport (Wenner, 2013b).

Notably, mediated sport narratives are inherently “dirty” and commodified (Wenner, 2007, 2009, 2013a). They are dirty, invoking Douglas’s (1966) seminal notion, because sporting logics, spread as contagion, wield influence by appending to other spheres of culture, naturalized but little recognized as “matter out of place” (p. 66). Communicative engagement with sports dirt, intertwined with fanship enthusiasm, may receive little resistance as it is ritualistic, compartmentalized, and aimed at pleasure. When one factors this in along with Bauman’s (2007) observations about “consumer sociality” pervading in an obligatory “market-mediated mode of life” and Debord’s (1967/2004) conclusion that today’s lived world is anchored in a commodity logic, it is hard to see sport narratives on media’s main stages as anything other than commodity narratives. While sport-related advertising narratives are most archetypal, sports reporting, commentary, and announcing across media platforms are necessarily set in the logics of consuming both sport and media.

Over time, main stage mediasport conventions have coalesced around a form of address, a way of “hailing” and anchoring subject position, in telling the tale of sport that I call the “mediasport interpellation” (Wenner, 2013b). Here, hailing us through a dominant, stable, and interlocked “holy trinity” of gender, fan, and consumer identities in relation to sport is foundational to mediasport power. While cognizant that hailing to other identities—such as race, ethnicity, class, and nation—factor into many mediasport ideological equations, the mediasport interpellation poses that assertions about gender, the workings of fanship, and assumptions about consumption undergird the ideological work of mediasport narratives.

Gender remains the great divide of sport. Privileging male sport with routine celebration on culture’s main stages, mediasport expands that crevasse. Even with increased pressures for change in gender roles and power relations, men continue to largely “own” sport and its consumption, and mediasport enables celebrating a last bastion of “vestigial hypermasculinity” (Wenner, 1998a). Further, mediated sport’s narrative spaces routinely engage in symbolic annihilation, trivialization, and ambivalence when characterizing women in relation to sport.

Mediated sport also helps construct and hail a particularlized fanship. Fanship norms, for female and male fans, disproportionately follow and celebrate male sporting performance. The naturalization of female fanship for male sport is well-entrenched and male (and even female) fanship for women’s sport has been exceptional and elusive. When main media stages, such as Olympic Games coverage, focus on women’s sport, much is “gender appropriate.” Finally, media castings of sport fanship, from characterized fanship in advertising (Wenner, 2013b) to those highlighted in coverage of contests, rely on self-serving imagery celebrating diehard, animated, colorful fans who consume (male) sport with rabid commitment.

Through the constancy of such “imagined” fanship, media sport coverage and sport-anchored advertising have worked to align our fanship identities with our consumer identities. The hypercommodification that has infused our relations with both sport and media is now foundational. Following Bauman (2007), in an increasingly promotional mediasportscape, sport fans are both idealized as consumers and have become commodities themselves. As a consequence, sport fans, in both “lived experience” and idealized narrative imaginings, have their agency increasingly defined and confined by the commodity context while cognizant of their own commodity value (Wenner, 2007). Through constant hailing, sport-related consumption has been established and experienced as pleasure. It is this seating in pleasure that enables the dirty entailments of mediasport to resonate with consumers and mobilize lasting ideological powers.

Futures

Some suggest that with the advance of new digital and social media, much change is likely for mediasport. There is much fine work in this area (Hutchins and Rowe, 2013) and, I am afraid, some undue euphoria. Some portend that new media will bring meaningful new relations in how sport transacts culturally as more of us become “prosumers,” producing media as well as consuming it.

My assessment, based on what I see as the “lasting power” of the mediasport interpellation, aligns with the French expression “the more things change, the more they stay the same” (Wenner, 2014). This is not meant to be flippant or disregard that new media may indeed bring new opportunities for the citizen-fan to interact in the mediasphere about sport. Rather, it is to say that the “mediatization” and “sportification” logics that are embedded in the mediasport interpellation are considerable. They are also enmeshed with pleasure and entrenched subject positions.

For the foreseeable future, dominant mediasport will remain the rock hitting the water, with ripples from its splash largely setting the terms and conditions of engagement for new and social media. After all, the fodder and cultural logic concerning sport that grounds social media and blogging has to emanate from somewhere. The sporting contest, the point of departure, still resides in the hands of institutionalized mediasport. Thus, new sport media will likely build from a reliance on the old.

Because of this, change, the need for which is embedded throughout the scholarly research agenda for mediasport, may be slower than anticipated. Still, the future for mediated sport research is bright. Concern over mediated sport has spread across a broad palette to color the sociology of sport. Mediasport, now with dedicated scholarly journals and fast increasing legitimacy in communication and media studies, has reached critical mass. One can only hope that, with this, the received logic and power of the mediasport interpellation will begin to give way.