The Paradoxical Character of Live Television Sport in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

The interacting social forces that have shaped the development of the electronic media constitute complex and contrary developments. Television technology, unlike that of the cinema, took a long time to grow from a technological possibility in the 1930s to maturation in the 1970s. Mega-events such as the Olympic Games and the World Cup have both a centripetal and a centrifugal character. They suck in global attention in a vortextual fashion, and yet the spectacle is not so much local and embedded as it is dispersed around the globe. Live sport, dispersed across platforms, is part of a bifurcation of social life—people are half present and embedded, half engaged in virtual interactivity. Technology has typically developed in two directions—producing the giant screens of public viewing spaces and also of the living room, and producing the miniaturization that enables live sport on mobiles, watches, and the Google Glass. Finally, media sport is ubiquitous yet is all but invisible to many others who simply filter it out.