ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the development of the socio-cultural study of sport and media within the sociology of sport disciplinary tradition. The relatively late arrival of the socio-cultural study of sport and media was influenced by the terroir of two disciplines – sport studies and media studies – both of which were emerging and, being a bit insecure in the academy, were seeking legitimacy. Whether motivated by critical concerns over power or inequality or social process, the study of mediasport entails understanding the intersection of core components in the communication process: senders/institutions/production/encoding, messages/content/texts/representation/signification, and receivers/audiences/fandom/consumption/decoding. Two UK-centered books on television and sport frame Mediasport 2.0. One, S. Barnett’s Games and Sets, presents a pessimistic cultural history of the evolutionary relationship of sport and television. The second, Whannel’s Fields in Vision, was the first sole-authored work to consider the range of mediasport inquiry.
