ABSTRACT
This chapter follows with a review of the symbiotic relationship between mass media and sport, and the digital disruptions when new media collide with this sedimented relationship; then, data from two distinct social media platforms are used to illustrate how the digital revolution is better understood as transformations that contain both patterns of continuities and discontinuities; finally, it ends with a discussion on how digital media transformed the once sedimented relationship between mass media and sport by extending rather than replacing it. The impacts of digital transformations were also experienced in sociological enquiry practices to a point where an enlarged tradition of research has emerged. New digital media distinctiveness in relation to traditional analogue media centres around four features in terms of affordances: capacity for interactivity; on-demand and real-time access; all users become consumers and producers; hybridity of mixing one-to-many, one-to-one and many-to-many forms of communication.
