Global Mediasport: Contexts, Texts, Effects

This chapter explores the emergence, features, and tension points of sport within the global media system. It, first, details how developments in the economics, technology, and regulation of media delivery, commencing during the 1980s, stimulated the emergence of a “new media order” that profoundly implicated sport. The subsequently shifting nature, structures, ownership, and consumption of sport incorporated new services including: dedicated sports channels; satellite and cable distribution networks; and pay-per-view and subscription networks and events. The need for detailed and nuanced analyses of the complex terrain of global mediasport as it is manifest across various locales; characterized by inequality and disjuncture as much as integration, is noted. The chapter, second, turns to, transformations of sport, resistance, and questions of “cultural citizenship,” dynamics of Westernization/post-Westernization, and the shifting and at points paradoxical status of the nation state within global mediasport dynamics. Finally, I document the recent transformations wrought by the emergence of “new” media for the global mediasport scape: the internet (message boards, online discussion, podcasting, wikis, video hosting sites), e-commerce, blogs (the blogosphere), microblogs (the Twittersphere), video games, and virtual reality. In particular, I consider the potential of new media to be a democratizing force across the media sportscape.