ABSTRACT
Sport and sport media culture today are an integral part of what Paul Virilio, dromological theorist of speed, power and technology, terms the city of the instant. In this dromoscopy (Virilio, 2005a), amidst what he sees as the contemporary collapse of time and distance, Virilio positions the city of the instant (Redhead, 2004a; Virilio, 2005b) in a rapidly shrinking world of what I have labelled mobile city cultures (Redhead, 2011). For Virilio this prescient concept of city of the instant connotes a live audience of millions or, possibly billions, watching sport events like World Cups or Olympics or Paralympics anywhere around the world, on various devices, all at the same time (give or take a little bit of digital delay). But it can, equally, signify all the social networking sites of new media, globally millions or billions, of connected users all over the world, often in real time. In Virilio’s writing ever since the 1950s, it is frequently television that has been the main platform for such a broadcasting community or city of the instant. In recent analyses, however, sports media analysts are increasingly writing about global sport going beyond television (Guilianotti and Robertson, 2009; Hutchins and Rowe, 2012; Millward, 2011; Redhead, 2010a, 2010b; Rowe, 2011), a situation where multiple different platforms exist. There has been to some extent a move, as Brett Hutchins and David Rowe put it, from a state of broadcasting scarcity to what might be seen as digital plenitude (Hutchins and Rowe, 2009). That state of overproduction of information is what characterises social media sites and their connection to global sport media. For Virilio, though, a theorist who sees in every new technology the possibility of the accident, apocalypse is only around the corner. An “accidentology” (Matthewman, 2013; Virilio, 2007, 2010a) is required so it can all be put into a theoretical, cultural, political and even military perspective (Virilio, 2005a, 2012).
