Sport and globalisation

I caught an interesting broadcast on ABC Radio National the other week. The show was called The Sports Factor and the guest was Professor Toby Miller of the University of California, Riverside. You can view a transcript of the program or download the MP3.

The program led me to do my own thinking about the impact of globalisation on sport and new media as well. Sports fans are readily adopting the Internet as their preferred medium for accessing sporting information, but they’re not necessarily using social media. Those that are using social media, are probably the type that Bourdieu termed ‘connosieurs’  – those who identify strongly with a team or perhaps the game itself, almost at the level of an idealised abstraction.

From the results of my survey on people’s use of sports media to date, it would seem that the majority of these users are engaging with social media either because they feel that the mainstream media misses issues to do with their sport and they’re glad to have a forum to raise them in, or because they feel that social media makes a better medium for discussing issues than talback radio or newspaper opinion pages.

Amongst these users it feels as if their use of social media is heading in two different directions, and they have two distinctly different rationales for their use of the medium. There are those that are going with the tide that is globalisation and those that are going with it.

Those who are going with the tide of globalisation are likely to be younger users who have either grown up with pay television or frequent access to the Internet. These fans are part of the era where sport has become a commodity – a form of entertainment, that is used to sell broadcasting rights and merchandise. In that marketplace, their local sports team isn’t necessarily the best product on the shelf – instead of going for the St Kilda team who play a mediocre brand of Australian rules football, they might choose Arsenal who play an exciting brand of association football.

Pay television with its 24 hour channels of international sport and the Internet with its rapid access to news and statistics have introduced these people to this global sporting landscape. Social media has taken their access to sport a step further, and given them forums, blogs and social networks to connect with others and share their thoughts on their favourite sport. What is often observed in these forums is a simulated match day experience – fans will discuss team selection and match-ups before the game begins, and then when the match begins, they will sit with their computers watching the coverage on television and post comments, sharing the experience of the match with fellow fans all around the world.

Then there are those that are going against globalisation. These fans seem to be the kind of people who grew up when Essendon played all its matches at Windy Hill, and Footscray (not the Western Bulldogs) played all its matches at the Western Oval (not the Whitten Oval). This was a time when sport was the pinnacle of community representation, and stars of the local football team were that suburb or region’s pin-up boys.

This anti-globalisation sentiment can be immediately felt in the names of some of these sites; for example Punt Road End is Richmond’s unofficial homepage, and recognises both their traditional home at the Punt Road Oval and their new ‘homeground’ of the MCG, but the emphasis is very much on Punt Road. The site feels very much like it is trying to recapture the sentiment that has traditionally made Richmond what it is; not only in the name, but in the section that is attributed to Jack Dyer, arguably Richmond’s most famous player, and the dedicated history section that can be found on the site.

Within the forum itself there is also the ‘Blast from the past’ group for sharing footy memories, and the group for general discussion of Richmond is called ‘Dyer-tribe’, another reference to the famous ‘Captain Blood’.

When it comes down to it, these fans exhibit similar behaviours to my ‘pro-globalisation’ group mentioned above, watching the football on television or radio, computer at hand, making comments and barracking on the match. But in the case of Punt Road End at least, it feels as though the site is trying to reconstitute a sense of community surrounding the Richmond football club that is being lost as sport is becoming increasingly commodified.