Sport Like A Mixed Form Of Communication Essay, Research Paper

Sport Like a Mixed Form of Communication

Understanding of mass communication without attention to sport coverage is practically
impossible. Through the mass media, millions and even billions of viewers, listeners and readers
are brought into the experience of a great sports performance. The emotional power of sports
performance enchanted by slow-motion video and musical sound track, can take you to breath
away or bring tears to you eyes.
There are a lot of massive spectacles like the Super Bowl, the World Series, the NBA play-offs,
the Olympic Games, College Football Games. Each of these sports activities takes in many
millions of dollars from television revenues and dominates national sports news for days or
weeks.
Cultural Importance
Media sports provide dominant myths in modern culture. Rituals are the repeated activities that
act out myths. There are a lot of important rituals for people who found of sports activities. One
of the such rituals come to dominate for a few hours or days or weeks the life of traditional
village, so the televised football, baseball, basketball, hockey, or other major game takes on
central importance for whole communities and regions during specific periods. Fans schedule
their lives on certain days, especially Saturdays or Sundays, around televised sports.
The economic impact of media sports illustrates the central importance to our culture. For
example: Statistics shows that Americans spend more than 60 billion of dollars annually on
sports (it is between 1% or 2% of Gross National Product). Being a star in media sports in
America means receiving a temporary income in 6 or 7 figures.
Personal Identification and Heroes
Sports fans often identify themselves with teams, players, and regions so that outcome takes on
personal significance to them. Social psychology has pointed out how personal identification
with a group occurs when the self-identity of a person takes on the frame of reference of the
larger group. As gratification research points out, we use media to serve both cognitive and
affective needs. Sports fans identify with their teams or stars and, through media, acquire
information and understanding about them and feel emotional identification with them.
Media sports center attention on specific individuals, who through this process, become largerthan-life heroes and models for successful conduct. Sports today in our mass-mediated culture
provide superstar archetypes to spur the imagination and dominate the ideals of youth and adult
alike. Sport lefts fans see not only great deeds but also the deflation of heroes in their bad
moments, the failure of authority in crisis a reassuring experience for common people all too
aware of their own limitations. Subconsciously we may reflect, If Mike Tyson or Wade Boggs
or Pete Pose cannot control his personal life, perhaps my life is not so bad. Sports pages today
examine the heroes in details, warts and all, outlining details of greedy contracts, after-hours
drug abuse, and sex lives, but sports heroes and their motivating power over others live on.
Binary Oppositions
The influential French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss (1967) argued for the importance of
identifying the fundamental two-sided conflicts, or binary oppositions in sports.
One of such two-sided conflicts is a distinction between individual and team sports and typical
gender patterns in sport. Female sports have traditionally been individual. Tennis, swimming,
ice-skating, golf, and gymnastics come to mind. But the dominant media sports have been team
sports baseball, basketball, football, and hockey, among others. Women participate in
individual sports, which are less dominant in male-managed media.
Another binary distinction is the conflict between sport players and investors. Who should
receive the greater rewards, those who invest the capital in the business side of sports or those
who involved in sport playing? With television dollars creating inflation, both sides can become

absurdly wealthy, but players often for only brief periods of time. The material reality is that one
group labors and one group invests capital, and their interests conflict.
The other obvious binary opposition in media sports distinguishes between playing and
spectating. Classically, sports were heralded for all their benefits of health and fitness to
participants. But in the twenties century, media have made vicarious access to sports the more
prevalent and accessible form of involvement. This mediated form of involvement in sport
eliminates the benefits for physical health and reduced them to psychic, emotional, and social
benefits. While these benefits exist, they leave the possibility of fans leading an objectively
passive and unhealthy life-style while, fantasizing themselves into a false self-image of action,
vigor, and victory.
Another distinction can be made between live attendance in the arena and media participating.
Arena attendance carries with it an environment of crowds, expressive behavior of cheering and
booing, and physical movement to and at the game. Media participation, however, isolates the
fan from the event and its crowd. The two experiments are very different. Fans sometimes make
efforts to combine them. One can find spectators in arenas with radio earplugs, binoculars, and
television sets to add on the media experience.
Another valuable distinction is clarification of differences between print and electronic forms of
sports communication media. Electronic media allow instantaneous, real-time participation in a
sport through television or radio. Print media allow delayed re-presentation of sports events and
facts through newspapers, magazines, and books. In fact, the various media mutually support
each other in sports coverage, and fans usually follow a mixture of electronic and print media.
Different studies and analysis opens up many of the inner dimensions of the experience of sports
and media. Understanding sports, media, and spectacle reveals both details and generalizations
about our culture and our general humanity.
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