The mediated live experience and the spatial reconfiguration of the sport act

Abstract

The media-sport relation of interdependency has influenced both the commodity value of sport actors and events, as well as the mere sport experience. The present study focuses on the reconfiguration process of the spectatorship experience through media, addressing two of its central dimensions: the emotional and physical one. Along with the wide accessibility to sport events and a progressive grow of audiences, media provided a mediated live experience that ended up competing with the genuine live experience. Strongly related and dependent on the technological changes and the dynamics of the globalization process, media went beyond simply transmitting the sport event, engaging in a process of redefining it. In doing so, they generated a deterritorialized laboratory sport experience, “hotting-up” the spectatorship experience and minimizing the perceptual constrains. This, in turn, ended up by making this media-sport hyperreality more appealing than the genuine live experience of sport acts. In addressing the spatial reconfiguration of the spectatorship experience, I have built up a new model in order to better respond to the primacy of connectivity over the space-dependent experience of sport acts: the scattering model of sport spectatorship. Moreover, I discuss the mixture of the private and public zones as a strategic way of maximizing the accessibility and customization of sport media-products, inside the wider process of sport commodification.