Global Sports Events as Platforms for Innovation

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Historically, sport has had a special relationship with media and mega sporting events have provided a global platform for technological and social innovation. The Global Sports Events as Platforms for Innovation panel brings together an interdisciplinary and international array of scholars to explore this synergetic relationship through a range of case studies and perspectives. In doing so, this panel expands the scope of the Sport Communication Interest Group beyond sporting events alone and into the fabric of socio-political and technological change. It also draws attention, for the first time at an ICA conference, to sport as an important cultural and communicative engine for innovation.

The first presenter examines the branding and content production strategies behind ABC Sport, America’s first sports division network, around its launch in 1960 and broadcasting of the Olympics through the '60s and '70s. The author makes a historical argument for how the television channel created an image for itself and, by extension, the Olympic Games as spaces where one can expect to see the launch of new technologies and content production innovations. The second presenter tackles the issue of sociopolitical innovation by studying the mediated evolution of the racial framing of athletes. Arguing that sports events are powerful platforms for social awareness and change, the presentation critically explores ESPN’s The Body Issue through framing theory to analyze to what degree narrative evolution has occurred and old racial frames remain.

The third panelist traces the organizational and technological developments leading to the launch of the first Olympic website for the Atlanta Games in 1996. By studying the press and trade coverage around the digitization of the Games the author also makes a broader claim for the understanding of organizational change and mega events in terms of creative evolution. The fourth presenter studies both the London 2012 Olympics and the Glasgow 2014 Commonwealth Games to tease out the political economic roots of games-related socio-technological innovation and citizen use patterns. In turn, we emerge with a better understanding of the ideological construction of Games-related technology as well as the ways in which everyday users can subvert it. The final panelist uses examples from the Football World Cup 2006 and 2014 to show how different media technologies gain intelligibility and ‘urgency’ by their connection to sport’s spatial and temporal practices. This suggests that mega events carry certain rationalities and aesthetic qualities that transform appropriate ways of audience consumption and experience.

Sub Unit

• Sports Communication

Chair

• Nicholas David Bowman, West Virginia U

Individual Presentations

• The Network of the Olympics”: ABC Sports and the Industrial Uses of Technological Innovation During the Broadcast Era - Travis Vogan, U of Iowa

• Shot in Black and White: Visualized Brawn and Brain Framing within ESPN’s The Body Issue - Gregory A. Cranmer, West Virginia U; Alexander Lindon Lancaster, West Virginia University

• Digitizing the Games - Katerina Girginova, University of Pennsylvania

• Innovation as Identification: A Sociotechnological Critique of the 2014 Commonwealth Games and the 2012 London Olympics - Christopher Jonathan Finlay, Loyola Marymount U

• The Operational Aesthetics of Sport’s ‘Mega Events’ - Markus Stauff, U of Amsterdam