Mediapolis n.º 4

Abstract

Sport is still hostage to several stigmas and suffers from a certain degree of academic isolation when it intersects with Social and Human Sciences. To dedicate a Mediapolis edition to the relationship between sport, media and communication is a bold step, especially in the Portuguese academic context. Our academy is still inherits from the Anglo-Saxon sport studies, crystallized in the sixties, seventies and eighties of the twentieth century, accustomed to associate sport with concepts of order, discipline and alienation of the masses. In this sense, sport would be epistemologically fixed in the field of leisure time, understood as a marginal theme, away from important issues that rule human life. On the other hand, in the field of media, journalism and communication, we see an exponential growth throughout the twenty and twenty-first centuries, although we continue to see sport as a minor issue in informative terms when compared with those subjects considered more relevant, such as politics, economics or diplomacy, for example. The large audiences generated by sport – and the massification (popular and by the media) associated thereto – led to the removal of a part of the intellectual community, hostile to this kind of popular phenomena, often pejoratively dubbed as mass culture and low culture.The challenge of this Mediapolis edition is to precisely demonstrate, once again, how sport can and should be the subject of research in the academic and scientific sphere, given its social plasticity and appeal to interdisciplinary and/or multidisciplinary approaches. Appearing in the ninetieth century and popularized in the twentieth century, the sport phenomenon has reached the new millennium as a creator of behaviors at a global scale, assuming itself as a total social fact, worthy of profound reflection by the Social, Human and Communication Sciences.