What is it about?
Sport's role in social and cultural life is significant, and is recognised by policies in several countries that guarantee free access to televised sport of national importance and cultural significance. This article, focused on Australia, is concerned with how social variables influence citizens' relationships to televised sport, and raises questions about national policies, commerce, cultural diversity and global mobility.
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Why is it important?
Media sport is an area where high financial stakes can come into conflict with the citizens' rights to public culture. Governments intervene in the sport media market on behalf of citizens, but it is necessary to have a good understanding of how they relate to sport and how sport relates to social and cultural inequalities and, in the case of gambling, to the exploitation of vulnerable people.
Perspectives
I am concerned about the impact of commercial forces on public culture, and how turning citizens' rights into consumers' choices can have the impact of socially and culturally excluding and displacing people on the basis of their capacity to pay. But I also grapple with the intricacies and ironies of mandating one form of highly commercialised culture as more important than others and enshrining in it law.
Professor David Rowe
Western Sydney University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Cultural citizenship, media and sport in contemporary Australia, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, April 2016, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1012690216641147.
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