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[This Year's December Days Theme is Community, and all the forms that it takes. If you have some suggestions about what communities I'm part of (or that you think I'm part of) that would be worth a look, let me know in the comments.]
Sport is supposed to be a nearly-universal human experience. What sport supposedly is the universal one is much more up for debate than whether or not sport is a regular experience for just about everyone growing up. Sport is now one of the things that having it televised often means some amount of money is changing hands in advertisement dollars, or someone is getting greater exposure (and possibly an audience that is more than just those who are at the arena) by having their performance captured and broadcast for remote viewing. Sport viewing also generally has been enhanced through the overlay of various graphics and graphics systems that keep the viewer aware of the score, where someone is in the game, who is currently the person performing the action, or who the competitors are, and a wealth of other information and data that is carefully orchestrated to supposedly be out of the way of the actual match action. I say "supposedly," because those information bugs rarely seem to take into account the possibility that someone is watching the match with captions/subtitles on, and the captions are often placed right in the middle of someone's score bug in the bottom of the screen. Or there's a digital overlay on top of the score bug for controlling how you are watching the match.
Despite these occasional flaws, the actual watching of sport part is pretty interesting. And not just the usual candidates for a United States audience, but the ones with international provenance. I get excited in Olympic years because it means for a couple weeks, the sport available to watch on primary networks is something other than gridiron football, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, or association football. (And then, for whatever coverage it receives, the Paralympic Games also showcase the different ways that bodies play sport.) Yes, there's also national partisanship, but generally, getting to watch sport played is a delight.
( Which is, I suppose, a bit of an oddity )
It's fun to watch.
(There are serious issues, though, about sport where money, discrimination, the labor of specific skin colors, genders, and those who profit from them, and all the other ways that capitalism, racism, sexism, and plenty of other isms take something that's supposed to be fairly innocuous and "universal" and turns it into proxies for major issues, if not outright scandals. Being part of the community of sport enjoyers does not absolve me from understanding these issues and making decisions about what I will accept and what I will not.)
Sport is supposed to be a nearly-universal human experience. What sport supposedly is the universal one is much more up for debate than whether or not sport is a regular experience for just about everyone growing up. Sport is now one of the things that having it televised often means some amount of money is changing hands in advertisement dollars, or someone is getting greater exposure (and possibly an audience that is more than just those who are at the arena) by having their performance captured and broadcast for remote viewing. Sport viewing also generally has been enhanced through the overlay of various graphics and graphics systems that keep the viewer aware of the score, where someone is in the game, who is currently the person performing the action, or who the competitors are, and a wealth of other information and data that is carefully orchestrated to supposedly be out of the way of the actual match action. I say "supposedly," because those information bugs rarely seem to take into account the possibility that someone is watching the match with captions/subtitles on, and the captions are often placed right in the middle of someone's score bug in the bottom of the screen. Or there's a digital overlay on top of the score bug for controlling how you are watching the match.
Despite these occasional flaws, the actual watching of sport part is pretty interesting. And not just the usual candidates for a United States audience, but the ones with international provenance. I get excited in Olympic years because it means for a couple weeks, the sport available to watch on primary networks is something other than gridiron football, basketball, ice hockey, baseball, or association football. (And then, for whatever coverage it receives, the Paralympic Games also showcase the different ways that bodies play sport.) Yes, there's also national partisanship, but generally, getting to watch sport played is a delight.
( Which is, I suppose, a bit of an oddity )
It's fun to watch.
(There are serious issues, though, about sport where money, discrimination, the labor of specific skin colors, genders, and those who profit from them, and all the other ways that capitalism, racism, sexism, and plenty of other isms take something that's supposed to be fairly innocuous and "universal" and turns it into proxies for major issues, if not outright scandals. Being part of the community of sport enjoyers does not absolve me from understanding these issues and making decisions about what I will accept and what I will not.)
