Reflections on Communication and Sport

In this essay, David Rowe reflects on how the nexus of sport and communication has affected national and global sensibilities. Sport contests take place at particular times in specific places, usually in a stadium setting, but not all who desire to watch can be present in the stadium. Without mediated communication, the vast edifice of contemporary sport would have remained largely localized, segmented activities. Progressively under modernity, print media could discuss and interpret sport for those who were far distant; electronic media brought the sights and sounds of the unique event to them in real time, and much else besides; and now online media enable people all over the world to communicate with each other about sport. Communication and sport are, then, demonstrably indissoluble and of intrinsic importance as a focus of sociocultural organization, activity, identity, and affect as well as of capital accumulation. Mediated sport is thereby carried into virtually every other sociocultural domain. Understanding the dynamics of communication and sport is, therefore, an essential capability for anyone who wishes to function as an engaged, knowledgeable citizen of a sport-saturated world that they may not have made but must nonetheless inhabit.