ABSTRACT
Globally, the promotion of sporting achievement represents an important method by which a distinctive national identity is created in popular culture. 1 Involvement in a sporting ‘mega-event’ – as participant or host nation – offers the opportunity for the celebration of athletic heroism or the invention of new national traditions, and it may propagate a kind of ‘sporting nationalism’, a ‘nationalist sentiment or ideology that is configured and promoted through sport’ (Cho 2009: 349). In the age of modernism and nationalism, ideologies were constructed and disseminated visually through mainstream broadcast media. 2 The globalization of the visual – a characteristic of postmodernism – apparently offers consumers opportunities to enrich their everyday lives by gaining insights they would otherwise not see or by creating visual self-representations for others. Visual experience, in other words, is a central mode of individual and collective self-reflection. The elevation of an idea (such as nationalism) and the exploration of that idea are the primary aim of visual satire. This chapter investigates the construction of images of sport in Russian political cartoons published via global online social network services in 2016, and considers whether the nationalistic charge of a cartoon is amplified when the subject of international sport converges with globalized networked media.
