Reflections on Communication and Sport

Abstract

In this essay, Lawrence Wenner reflects on the social and cultural importance of communication about sport. He considers the major influences on his research agenda and how the evolution of his research program came to change over time from one centered on empirical audience study to one anchored in critical and cultural studies. In a focus section on reading sport and narrative ethics, the constituent parts of a “dirt theory of narrative ethics” are framed and contextualized as a response to the increasing presses of commodification on sport-referential narratives. The essay closes with a look ahead for communication and sport research that encourages researchers to turn increasing attention to both institutional/organizational studies and audience studies in order to supplement our critical understandings of sport media texts and narratives.

Keywords

media sport narratives gender fanship consumer culture dirt theory

Why Communication and Sport Matters

It took me a while to “get it” about how media affects society. Perhaps, I was lead astray by early mass communication research and its preoccupation with looking for evidence of an immediate “big bang” of media influence. Certainly, in the early days, researchers looked for the immediate effects of propaganda, for change and conversion in political positions, and for evidence that watching media violence necessarily led to increased violent behavior. Of course, we now know that communication processes and people are far more complex than that. Yet, when people deny the “big bang” of media on their personal lives—they may have watched a lot of media violence but never assaulted anyone—they may miss the far more pervasive (and far more difficult to measure) constant “drip, drip, drip” of media influence on culture and the routine meanings that we rely on in making sense of our worlds. But, like water dripping on stone, media leaves its mark.

Communication about sport too is more about the slow drip than the big bang. Certainly, we have critical events, a Super Bowl or World Cup, or a media revelation about doping, cheating, or unsportsmanlike behavior, and indeed, these matter. Still, the outcome of any one contest, season, or the breaking of some record pales in the shadow of how we come to understand sport and how it fits into our cultural and social worlds. Of course, this is where the processes of communication and the workings of media come in. As I have said before, the reason that studying communication and sport is important is that “the frame is more important than the game” (Wenner, 2006). Communication enables the frame through which we understand and share our cultural understandings about sport and its place in society.

Communication about sport helps frame how we come to understand many things. We are all familiar with how politics may be reported as a game (although it is much more of a bloodsport). Communicating through sport enables an election campaign to be seen as a “horse race” or “prize fight.” Along the way politicians “land blows,” “throw long bombs,” “hit home runs,” and look for “slam dunk” issues. Certainly sport is not politics, but sporting language frames much of how we have come to think about politics.

At a very basic level, communication about sport matters because so much of it influences our identities. More than any social institution, even the military, gender remains the great divide in sport. Historically male practice, sport remains ideologically as a male domain (Gosling, 2007) and a soothing last bastion of “vestigial hypermasculinity” (Wenner, 1998a). Guided by “sexual geography” both in competition and in consumption (Wenner & Jackson, 2009b), culturally important sports in the media eye infrequently pit men against women or put them on the same team. Today, even with more women becoming fans, the eyes of sports audiences largely remain focused on men’s performances on the main media stages.

From another vantage point, communication and sport matter because sport is a kingpin of media and consumer cultures. In an era of fragmented media, sport not only plays on media (particularly television’s) main stages, but is one of few remaining enablers to reach the culture’s largest audiences. This is true not only of economic juggernauts such as the Super Bowl, but it is true, collectively, when thinking of the audiences for a particular sport such as intercollegiate basketball or Major League Baseball. Increasingly, it is impossible to think about sport in its mediated settings without assessing how the market and its financial considerations have played a role. Simply put, the economic influences of media have changed sport, changed our associations with it, and have affected the stories that are told through sport, both in everyday communication and in the service of commerce.

My Journey With Communication and Sport

Like the Grateful Dead, my journey with communication and sport has been a long strange trip. Perhaps, I knew I was on to something, as my first project on media and sport aimed to be a comprehensive review of the literature in both sport and media studies (evolving to Wenner, 1989b). I have “blamed” Michael Real before (Wenner, 2006) for stimulating my interest for doing so by virtue of publishing what I think is the field’s masterpiece: “The Super Bowl: Mythic Spectacle” (Real, 1975). I suppose I could also blame my father, who would watch almost any ball moving across our living room’s television screen. But I have to shoulder some of the blame myself. As a sports fan (more then than now) I was frankly puzzled that the scholarly community in the field of communication seemed to ignore sport.

I was also in a transitional mode in my career and had pretty much said what I could about media audience “uses and gratifications” (c.f. Palmgreen, Wenner, & Rosengren, 1985). At the same time, I developed concerns over self-report data, sample generalizability, and increasingly “fancy footwork” in complex multivariate analysis. I was also at a “teaching institution” with no graduate program or assistants, so I tried my hand with critical analysis, following Real, of the Super Bowl (Wenner, 1989c). That case study, of “superhype” in the pre-game show (rather than the game itself), set in motion my “frame is more important than the game” lens that would influence my research focus in years to come.

Collectively, these influences—a literature stocktaking, a critical foray, and (near) “last stands” in uses and gratifications—came together in a larger effort of “community organizing.” This project, that I called a maiden voyage for taking sport seriously in the field of communication was a collection called Media, Sports, and Society (1989a). It brought together mainly American communication scholars. Many contributors, such as Michael Real, Jennings Bryant, Walter Gantz, Nick Trujillo, and Sut Jhally had dipped their toes in the communication and sport waters earlier than I.

Media, Sports, and Society was in many ways a naïve collection. It was American and communication-centric and featured only one sport sociologist, Rick Gruneau, shortcomings that in hindsight were unforgiveable. Still, Media, Sports, and Society helped energize and legitimize a new project in both media and sport studies in North America. My work on sport continued on what surely many saw as a “schizophrenic” dual track: a “new” critical turn juxtaposed with “legacy” survey analysis of television sport audiences. That this “legacy” work (c.f. Wenner & Gantz, 1998), which continued through the 1990s and focused on audience experience, fanship, and gender relations, was initially more influential was due in no small part to my colleague Walter Gantz.

A key influence for me that made my critical work more insightful was my engagement with sport studies. I got to know key players in sport and culture with regular attendance at meetings of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport and by reading and publishing in the Sociology of Sport Journal. Here I learned that sport studies knew more about media studies than media studies knew about sport. In the 1990s, my “going over to the other side,” by virtue of editing the Journal of Sport and Social Issues and heading a graduate program in sport management, helped me to understand sport more fully in social and economic contexts.

Getting “up close and personal” with sport management, combined with research for books on television criticism (Vande Berg & Wenner, 1991; Vande Berg, Wenner, & Gronbeck, 1998), helped sharpen my critical teeth. Iser (1978) might say that this period of my critical development featured a “wandering viewpoint.” Indeed, my short critical essays in Journal of Sport and Social Issues “wandered” and diverse research projects considered how sport’s mediation factored into interpretive communities (Wenner, 1993), therapy (Wenner, 1990), drug policy (Wenner, 1994a), sports bars (Wenner, 1998a), beer commercials (Wenner, 1991), and Olympics marketing (Wenner, 1994b).

Such “wandering,” when combined with broader engagement with sport studies, drove a second late 1990s effort in “community organizing,” entitled MediaSport (Wenner, 1998b), to be more global and inclusive of scholars in both sport and media studies. I also began to realize that my “wandering” walked on some central paths: gender, fanship, and consumer culture.

Continued work on television criticism (Vande Berg, Wenner, & Gronbeck, 2004) and appointment to a chair in communication and ethics combined to push my “critical turn” into one increasingly focused on ethics and the narratives of the sport marketplace. Here, I considered the Janet Jackson breast baring during the Super Bowl (Wenner, 2004) and the “moral contagion” that followed in televised sport advertising (Wenner, 2008b). More recently, my early preoccupation with “communicative dirt” (Wenner, 1991, 1994a) has taken shape in a “dirt theory of narrative ethics” (Wenner, 2007, 2009b) that has guided a series of studies examining narrative castings of gender and sports fanship in commodity narratives (Wenner, 2008a, 2009a, 2010, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2013c). Yet, amid this recent cohesion, an inescapable “wandering viewpoint” has fueled projects relating mediated sports to masculinity and beer (Wenner & Jackson, 2009a), cultural citizenship (Wenner, Bellamy, & Walker, 2013), and fallen sports heroes (Wenner, 2013a).

Focus: On Reading Sport and Narrative Ethics

Emerging from my “wandering” has been a common thread of concern that bridges audience experience and reader interpretations. It makes sense in many regard that, as I transitioned from empirical audience study to critical analysis, I would be drawn to reader-oriented criticism. For just as “uses and gratifications” elevated the role of audience activity in understanding media influence, reader-oriented criticism recognized the role of the reader in making sense of textual structures and assertions.

It was clear also, as my critical efforts “got legs,” that I was increasingly drawn to “follow the money.” It was the money of media that had after all made big-time sport big and extended its social and cultural influence. In approaching mediated sport, it struck me as increasingly naïve to leave the workings and effects of commodification out of any equation. Crawford’s Consuming Sport (2004) reinforced this sensibility. Set in consumer culture theory (c.f. Arnould & Thompson, 2005) and influenced by Bauman’s (2007) arguments about an increasingly pervasive “consumer sociality” in “liquid modern life,” Crawford concludes that sport fanship must necessarily be studied in the context of consumption. Axiomatic of this position is that all sport-referential narratives are influenced by logic of consumption, whether or not their primary goal is to market, promote, or advertise (c.f. Wenner, 2013b). Bauman (c.f. 2007; Rojek, 2004) would argue that the “consumerist syndrome” is so pervasive that it becomes “obligatory” for even “user-generated” fan narratives to rely on the logic of commodification (Wenner, 2012a).

What resulted from these influences was the development of a critical approach that was particularly suited to the analysis of sport-referential narratives in the media marketplace. What I called a dirt theory of narrative ethics (Wenner, 2007, 2009b) attempted to integrate a variety of critical impulses into a larger analytical strategy. A key tenet underlying this approach is simple: Narratives set in commodification are generally trying to get their way with you. We all know this intuitively of course: Advertising is ultimately more interested in its best interests than in yours.

This direction led my critical strategy to be anchored on one end in “dirt” and on the other “ethics.” A foundational strategy in advertising (and a necessity in a way in all communication) is the effective use of familiar associations to help explain a new communication. This point is recognized broadly in communication and cultural theory, from simple recognition of associative advertising strategies (Waide, 1987) to Hall’s (1980) processes of “articulation,” to McCracken’s (1990) recognition of “meaning transfer” and “displacement,” and even to Baudrillard’s (1993) notion of “hyperreality” where the original referent may disappear.

Still, more potent for me was anthropologist and linguist Mary Douglas’ (1966, p. 35) notion of “dirt” as “matter out of place.” While the connotation of Douglas’ “dirt” did not equate to inherent deviousness, it spoke of and to the omnipresent dangers in strategically importing meaning from one place, where it may belong, to another where it may be problematic or tainting. Advertisers and others who employ persuasive communication strategies do this routinely. Assessing the propriety of this practice calls out for ethical criticism. Thus, “dirt” and “ethics” became the bread of my sandwich in reader-oriented analysis of sport-referential narratives. Briefly, here’s how the sandwich pieces together as an iterative tripartite critical strategy.

Finding Dirt

In focusing dirt theory on sport-related narratives, one “follows the dirt.” For Douglas (1966), communicative dirt transcends boundaries. Developing the concept in Culture and Communication, Leach (1976) asserts “that power is located in dirt” because dirt brings meaning and creates change as it crosses boundaries. While this kind of change taps into Hall’s (1980) concerns over the dangers of “noncorrespondence” in the processes of articulation, such dynamics are noted earlier in “dirt theory.” For example, Enzenberger (1972, p. 105) argues that the “productive power” of media comes from its essential dirtiness and ability to “do away with cleanliness.” Hartley (1984, pp. 119, 122–127) sees communicative dirt as “parasitic” and “tainting,” with its inherent “messiness” allowing “borrowed languages” in key ways to be “semiotically stolen.” For me, of key interest is how routine “cultural borrowing” of the logics from one cultural sphere, such as sport, may enable, empower, and contaminate meanings in another. Because the “power of dirt ascends with its cultural primacy” (Wenner, 1991, p. 392), the “cultural leaks” of sport become more important when we consider sport-referential media narratives. Indeed, when we note “sport’s appeal” or claim that “sport provides a special setting for marketing products,” we recognize the power of sports dirt.

Of course, in analyzing sport-referential narratives, we need to assess communicative dirt stemming from much more than sport. Depending on the narrative, dirty meanings that are ported from old to new settings to manufacture strategic connections can be diverse. Depending on the focus of study, “out of place” meanings about gender, race, family, class, community, and consumption may be among the concerns of a dirt-centered analysis examining the cultural dynamic of the sport-referential narrative. Throughout, a series of basic questions about “following the dirt” govern critical inquiry. What is the character of dirt imported into the narrative? Where does it come from and where does it go? How is communicative dirt appended to sport and the fan/spectator/consumer in the new narrative setting? How is dirt used in shaping the new narrative and how does this use transform reading position and meanings? What distortions, fallacies, or deception are facilitated as dirt moves from one setting to another? Such concerns frame consideration of reading dynamics and the ways in which dirt interacts with characterizations of and urgings to the reader.

Constructing Readers

There has long been a de facto recognition of dirt in reader-oriented criticism as the approach hinges on what readers bring to the text. Readers necessarily soil new texts with familiar dirt even as readers transact with authorial dirt imported to the text to encourage preferred readings. While many strains of reader-oriented criticism and reception theory can be seen on the critical landscape (Machor & Goldstein, 2001; Tompkins, 1980), most useful to interrogating dirt have been Iser’s (1978) concerns with the (1) contextualization of implied readers, (2) drawing of readers in and by the text, and (3) nature of the reading act.

To fully reveal sport-referential narratives, particularly in the commodity setting, consideration must be taken of sporting “interpretive communities” (Fish, 1980), characterizations of textual surrogates and strategies (e.g., camera position, direct address) to encourage preferred readings, and how negotiation of redundancies and gaps in texts stimulate readerly disposition. In a dirt theory approach, special attention is given to how dirt both engages readers and frames assertions in the sport-referential narrative. Of particular interest is how this engagement/framing fusion drives understandings of an “imagined community” (Anderson, 1983) of idealized consumers set in relation to sport. Crystalized in this process are understandings about the improprieties that may have been taken in characterizing this community and narrative sensemaking of it. As a key corollary of dirt theory is that pleasurable dirt, such as that stemming from sport, may lower reader resistance, and that much enjoyment may be found in “rolling around in the dirt of the advertiser” (Wenner, 1991, p. 392), the last step in critical interrogation calls for ethical assessment of the transaction between dirt and its reading.

Deconstructing Ethics

Increasingly, there is agreement that ethical criticism has become inescapable in narrative analysis and cultural critique (Booth, 1998; Carroll, 2000; Eagleton, 2003). With focus on ethical tensions in texts and reading, ethical criticism raises questions about greater good, minimizing harm, other respecting care, veracity, fairness, justice, and other issues in order to reveal moral flaws in narratives as both aesthetic defects and as culturally problematic. A focus on dirt reveals what the “matter out of place” really is and does. Dirty assumptions about sport and our identities in relation to it may have ethical shortcomings prior to importation. In assessing sport-referential narratives that invoke these, particularly in the commodity setting, such an approach interrogates not only the propriety of dirt being imported but also the dirtiness encouraged in characterizing both the reader and the pathways that reading invites (Wenner, 2007). Triangulated analysis considers questions about the landing, buildup, movement, and interactive workings of sport, fanship, and consumer dirt along with problematic “dirty” evocations of relevant constituent parts of our core identities (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, class, age, and nation). Critical assessment requires asking whether liberties have been taken in using dirt to characterize interpretive communities or to push improprietously in attempts to control reading. Have logics about sport or our identities in relation to it been used to mask truth, reinforce prejudice, perpetuate inequities, and forego other respecting care or greater good? Such queries guide the ethical stocktaking of narratives that invoke sport in contemporary promotional culture.

Looking Ahead for Communication and Sport Research

While collectively my recent work argues strongly for the appropriateness of using a “dirt theory of narrative ethics” to assess sport-referential narratives, the approach necessarily sets focus on certain matters and dynamics at the expense of others. As such, it is certainly not the only way to go. Still, that its core concern focuses on the role of commodification in making sense of sport-referential media narratives as a key to understanding the social and cultural influences of mediated sport should resonate broadly. Although Einstein’s theory of relativity cautions that those “in motion” in this system may get false reads on the speed and efficacies of commodification, there is little denying that Bauman (2007) is onto something essential about the dynamics of our “market-mediated mode of life.” From my point of view, the lens of commodification and the “dirty” associations that “articulate” our understandings of sport are central to interrogating the media and sport nexus. Certainly, there is much “displaced meaning” that relies on the logic of sport and, further, the power of mediated sport may be very much reliant on a hyperreality with little correspondence to its referents.

This is all, in a way, encouragement to take communication about, in, and through sport seriously. There is much at stake. Sport is a potent social force and media product. This means that a journal like Communication & Sport can be about doing something very important. Certainly, there should be much on its agenda beyond my core concerns over the “dirtiness” of it all. Foremost, and this is an essential deficiency in my own “dirty agenda” about sport-referential narratives, we need to move, fast and hard, beyond textual analysis and criticism. As I have lamented many times (Wenner, 1998c, 2006), we tend to do the “easy stuff” first, and analysis of texts is not enough to get a good read on audience experience on one hand, and the dynamics of media sport institutions on the other.

It has been most disappointing how little research has been done on the institutional and organizational dynamics that shape media and sport. Indeed, the very real challenges of access and geography, as well as the time consuming requirements of extended observation and interviewing, can be daunting and discourage researchers from embarking on depth studies of organizational actors and actions. Still, we have too infrequently gotten “inside the heads” of sports media workers and managers, and this has been a major deficiency in rounding out our understandings of the dynamics at play in media production of sport and sport’s media strategies. Beyond these kinds of qualitative and observational studies, we need a cadre of researchers with economic and policy competencies to help give us more nuanced understandings of the marketplace that necessarily underlie our assessments of media texts and their cultural influences.

Mounting a generalizable audience study has always been challenging. I have spoken to my “exit” from audience study. In part that was due to my “critical turn,” but also to the changed conditions of doing meaningful survey research with limited resources. The tonnage of market research has raised suspicions about anyone looking for answers. But I’m afraid our increased reliance on the “easier paths” of sampling college students or doing Internet surveys using samples with unknown contours cannot advance reliability or validity in meaningful ways. But with the rise of qualitative “ethnographically” inspired audience studies, we need good survey research to test the breadth of the deeper observations that these studies yield. So too do we need savvy experimental research on audience experience and disposition. To my mind, the critical agenda cannot move forward on a stable basis without the help from allied audience study within complementary traditions.

It is clear that I have only spoken to the tip of the iceberg in looking ahead. The area of communication and sport has relied on some old saws—gender, fanship, and consumer culture among them—in fashioning its trajectory. As we look ahead, these will continue to be important, as will all of the issues raised in this collection of “reflections” by colleagues in this volume. Based as I am in the United States, I note some ongoing tendencies. One, perhaps because we are an ethnocentric and large nation, is to place too little attention on the role of nation in understanding media and sport. Second, as the promise of technology and being “on the leading edge” is an integral part of our national character, I worry that the seduction of mounting research agendas on new and social media will miss the forest for the trees. As McLuhan (1964) reminds us, media, after all, are always in transition and “new” is a relative term. When we focus on the “big bang” of the new, we often do so at the risk of missing the “drip, drip, drip” of the broader media mix. As noted earlier, it is in that constancy where media makes its mark.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

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