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When Australian Formula One driver\u00a0Daniel Ricciardo complained<\/a>\u00a0about multiple instant replays of Romain Grosjean\u2019s flaming crash at the Bahrain Grand Prix, he felt \u201cit was entertainment and they\u2019re playing with all of our emotions\u201d. What Ricciardo saw as \u201cpretty disgusting\u201d, \u201cdisrespectful and inconsiderate\u201d is actually routine contemporary fare in the\u00a0digital media sport world<\/a>.<\/p>\n The spectacle of sporting violence and mayhem is a key component of attention-grabbing audience appeal. In this instance, F1 did follow its policy of cutting all media feeds until it was quickly confirmed that nobody had died or was seriously injured. This is not always\u00a0possible or universally viewed as desirable<\/a>\u00a0in sport.<\/p>\n High-rotation, multi-angle replay followed. Australian driver and former world champion\u00a0Alan Jones declared<\/a>\u00a0that it all goes with the territory in \u201ca dangerous sport\u201d in which \u201cWe all like to see a good shunt as long as nobody gets hurt\u201d. But sportspeople do get hurt \u2013\u00a0as Grosjean was<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 and many are drawn to\u00a0watch violent incidents<\/a> involving various sports over and over.<\/p>\n As long as the\u00a0media have been studied<\/a>\u00a0systematically, there have been debates about whether violent content has no or negligible effect on those exposed to it, operates as a safety valve to discharge violent impulses, or provokes imitative behaviour and anti-social attitudes. Contact sport has been sociologically theorised as a space of legitimised violence, part of the \u201ccivilising process<\/a>\u201d that turned chaotic and dangerous folk rituals into regulated modern sport.<\/p>\n In this influential take on the \u201cquest for excitement<\/a>\u201d, everyday violence was outsourced to amateur and then professional sports organisations and on-sold as mass leisure. But, with the arrival of sport television, especially in digital form, practising sportspeople and the vast majority of spectators became separated by the screen. Increasingly, sport action resembled a video game with flesh-and-blood athletes reduced to two-dimensional moving images.<\/p>\n TV news could play and replay spectacular sporting incidents and calamities, sometimes in sync with their theme music. The Internet then offered many more opportunities to search for compilations of\u00a0\u2018greatest hits\u2019<\/a>\u00a0(physical collisions) or the most spectacular\u00a0motorsport crashes<\/a>.<\/p>\n As a result, the media\u2019s technical capacity to show graphic sport imagery of legitimate, illegitimate and accidental violence in sport is now increasingly at odds with concerns about the health and wellbeing of sportspeople.<\/p>\n While athletes and their representatives have, for example, taken chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) as a seriousness matter and\u00a0headed for the courts<\/a>, many sport journalists and fans still regard such concerns as signs of weakness and even as overweening political correctness.<\/p>\n Outgoing US President Donald Trump has characteristically taken this position, using the National Football League (NFL) as a metaphor in\u00a0accusing the game<\/a>\u00a0of becoming \u201csoft like our country has become soft\u201d. At a time when the integrity of\u00a0head injury assessments<\/a>\u00a0in the football codes is being debated in Australia, there were calls from sports journalists and others during the last\u00a0rugby league State of Origin<\/a>\u00a0series to \u201cbring back the biff\u201d \u2013 that is, encourage players to punch each other.<\/p>\n In its relentless search for audiences, television has demanded that all sports become faster, noisier, more dramatic and aggressive. The once-stately game of cricket is no exception. The 2014 tragic\u00a0death of Phillip Hughes<\/a>\u00a0on the field of play briefly demanded a rethink, but it was not long before the old take-no-prisoners approach returned, most notoriously during the acrimonious\u00a0\u2018Sandpapergate<\/a>\u2019 test match in South Africa in 2018.<\/p>\n Notably, most of the focus has been on sportsmen, both because they have historically dominated sport and given the widespread assumption that violence and aggression are masculine traits. But the recent rise of women\u2019s contact sports has challenged such conventional gendered assumptions.<\/p>\n Whether it is Ronda Rousey being\u00a0knocked out<\/a>\u00a0by Holly Holm in an Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bout in Melbourne in 2015, or\u00a0Melbourne\u2019s Meg Downie by Collingwood\u2019s Sophie Casey in 2017 in the\u00a0AFL Women\u2019s (AFLW)<\/a>, the heightened professionalisation and media profile of women\u2019s sport is bringing women\u2019s sporting violence into the living room in prime time as never before. It is also now available for\u00a0replay<\/a>\u00a0on multiple media platforms.<\/p>\n Representing violence in sport in the media raises serious ethical questions about the complicity of\u00a0media producers, journalists, sport organisations and audiences<\/a>\u00a0in the circulation of voyeuristic entertainment. Both the watching and the watched are, in different ways, jeopardised by the disconnection between the distant spectacle and proximate danger.<\/p>\n Alan Jones advised Daniel Ricciardo to \u201cgive it up\u201d if he is worried that Formula 1 is \u201cunsafe\u201d and wall-to-wall replays of a \u201cgood shunt\u201d make for splendid entertainment: a demand that drivers should take it or retire to the backseat. There is a similar expectation that footballers \u2013 and even more so, boxers \u2013 should measure their own and their country\u2019s \u2018hardness\u2019 by blows to the head. For Donald Trump, getting \u201ca little ding on the head\u201d and playing on regardless is a sign that the player is \u201ctough\u201d and patriotic.<\/p>\n In media sport, such armchair thrills are cheap. The real cost is absorbed by the brains and bodies of sportspeople, and their families, for whom endless replays of physical trauma in their everyday lives are not commanded by the flick of a switch.<\/p>\n Originally published on openforum.com.au<\/a>, When Australian Formula One driver\u00a0Daniel Ricciardo complained\u00a0about multiple instant replays of Romain Grosjean\u2019s flaming crash at the Bahrain Grand Prix, he felt \u201cit was entertainment and they\u2019re playing with all of our emotions\u201d. What Ricciardo saw as \u201cpretty disgusting\u201d, \u201cdisrespectful and inconsiderate\u201d is actually routine contemporary fare in the\u00a0digital media sport world. The spectacle of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":3928,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-okategoriserade"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\tQuest for excitement<\/h3>\n
\u201cSoft like our country\u201d<\/h3>\n
Gender play<\/h3>\n
\n
\nNovember 4, 2020.
\n<\/strong><\/span>Copyright \u00a9 David Rowe 2020<\/strong>
\nEmail:\u00a0d.rowe@westernsydney.edu.au<\/a>
\nTwitter: @rowe_david<\/a>
\nWebsite:\u00a0https:\/\/westernsydney.edu.au\/ics\/people\/researchers\/david_rowe<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"