Sport, Media and Visual Culture

Abstract

Sport in the media is not confined to watching a game on television, or reading about it in a newspaper or magazine. Advertisements on billboards litter our cities’ transport networks, featuring sports stars or sports images alongside with all manner of goods and services. Big screens are erected in public spaces to show sports events, sports shows sell televisions in shop windows, portable video game consoles let us play simulated sport on the go, and passers-by are regularly adorned with the logos of sports clothing brands. Going to a live sport event entails an engagement with a variety of mediated sport experiences, including the programmes, newspapers and scorecards that are collected on the way, the advertisements in the shops and bars that one passes by, the logo on the ticket, the big screen in the stadium and the advertisements on the scoreboard. While a majority of these experiences are dominated by the visual. The purpose of this paper is to explore and analyze the visual culture of the sport propagated by the media, the new trends of this visual culture, and what strategies can be employed in order to develop visual sports media. The study was conducted through a content analysis approach with a relevant literature review. The study revealed that there are numerous ways in which a new visual culture of sports can be created, and that this can be used as a strategy to develop sports. While this paper is confined to addressing the visual culture of sports, the researcher also makes reference to tactile and emotional cultures of sports. The findings in this paper are of significance to the sporting community.