Archive for category Academic

Online Sport Fandom in Australia

Posted by on Tuesday, 13 December, 2011

This is a draft of a bridging chapter in my dissertation.  It doesn’t get into things like I want it to. :/  I’m not entirely certain I’ll keep it in my dissertation but it is a day’s worth of writing. :(

 

 

Online Sport Fandom

What is the history of sport fandom online and why does it matter? Westerbeek & Smith (2002) argue that online sport fandom is important because it mirrors the offline community in being natural and organic.[1]  These fan created communities can be noticeably different from their offline counter parts in that they are not limited by geographic constraints. The authors also argue sport managers will only be successful at monetizing this community to meet institutional goals if they understand online demographics. (p. 167) Raney & Bryant (2006) support this idea, defines sport fandom on the Internet as “including streaming audio and video, message boards, and broadband” (p. 464) and these types of resources are subject to change as the Internet continues to evolve. (p. 464)  The authors describe fan involvement using the term “fan production”, describes the general creation of sport related web content as “mediated sports production” and discuss how this is mediated across different web spaces.  They argue fan production sits along side and equal to official production, and the Internet has allows fans to organize in ways they could not do in the pre-Internet era. (p. 463)  Raney & Bryant (2006) cite Shoham & Kahle (1996) as there is a group of sport fans consisting of sport viewers, who purely consume but have different interests levels in sport. (p. 461)

One of the recurring themes when looking at sport fandom and spectatorship in an online context is the large potential scope of content, and the many different consumption and participation types. Raney & Bryant (2006) discuss how along side an additional pure consumption of sport related content, online fans engage in two way communications that can be synchronous and a synchronous depending on the type of internet based communication used.  Kahle & Riley (2004) go deeper than just talking about types and places to interact.  They discuss how dedicated and passionate, team loyal online fans behave like offline fans, and cope with their teams losses by attacking the opposing team.[2]  They also argue that in online communities, fans utilizing online message boards appear to be more likely to attack the opposition after their team wins than after their team losses, with this type of behavior serving to define ingroups and outgroups, helping the community to bond. (p. 73) Hughson, Inglis & Free (2005) also echo the community aspect of the Internet, referencing online groups to earlier research about fans that called them proto-communities and communitas, and highlighting how sport fans online can form groups to fill a need to associate and bond with others, and provide people with a permanent or transient identity. Raney & Bryant (2006) discuss how different sport related content can be, from newly created and little known sports having a website to rulebooks by major sporting bodies. (p. 462) Rosner & Shropshire (2011) mention the scope of potential content and wide variety of ways to engage sport fans across multiple competitive levels of sport.(p. 217) Morgan & Summers (2005) look at fan consumption from the view of purchasing and provide data that shows online sport fans are more willing to buy products than other fan groups (p. 292) and discussed how fans are moving towards more mobile platforms for online consumption of sport related content. (p. 301)

What does this mean in terms of sport fandom and spectatorship online from an Australian perspective? The Internet began to play a key role in sport fandom by mid-1990s.   On an official level, early club based Internet outreach was often based around the official website and e-mail.  The medium allowed clubs to circumvent traditional methods of fan communication, such as the press, and access this group directly. (Masteralexis, Barr & Hums, 2005)

It was during this same early period that recognition for the need for internet created sport images happened, with photographers like Duane Hart leading this movement. (Skinner, 2007, p. 134)

In 1998, an international study by Depley was done to understand the characteristics of sport fans online.  It found online sport fans were 64% male, had an average age of 34 and a median income of $50,000 USD a year. (Westerbeek & Smith, 2002, p. 156)

By May 2000, 33% of all Australian households, 2.2 million homes, had access to the Internet on a home computer and 46% of Australian adults, 6.4 million people, had accessed the Internet. When online, these Australians were surfing the Internet, checking their e-mail and chatting online. (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2004, p. 514) 2000 and the Sydney Olympic Games saw the Internet play an adverse role in traditional media presentation of sport.  The wealth of information on the Internet in real time was so much that many people did not watch the Games, and it adversely impacted television ratings in places like the United States. (Gamache, 2010, p. 181)  During this same period, sport fans were active on sites such as America Online, Yahoo and MSN.  Much of the existing commercial created portals were not useful to fans in and of themselves for fans to meet their own needs; they required fans to build their own infrastructure. (p. 182) The fans that were getting online at this time were doing so free of the earlier cultural norms in Australian sport fandom; fans such as Perth Glory fans in the late 1990s, were creating fansites, not fanzines. (Brabazon, 2000)

In 2002, Australian sport fandom online got a major push when Telstra and the Australian Football League teamed together to provide a wide variety of content for sport fan consumption. (Westerbeek & Smith, 2002, pgs. 155-156)

In 2005, the best Internet access in Australia was available in cities, with quality, speed and accessibility to the Internet deteriorating the further one got away from major metropolitan areas.  This presented some issues for Australian sport fandom online because download speeds and access to the Internet meant limited participation in some geographic areas. (Morgan & Summers, 2005, p. 179)

In the context of the Internet, sport fandom has several components including consumption, participation and creation.  Online group participation serves a similar function to offline sport groups.  Australia has had high rates of infrastructure, but it is not without some problems that have adversely impacted the sport community.  The Internet has had an impact on traditional media, and online sport groups, while behaving like offline groups, appear to have some unique characteristics.

 

Australian Bureau of Statistics (2004). 1301.0 – Year Book Australia. Canberra, Australia: Australian Bureau of Statistics.

Brabazon, T. (2000). Tracking the Jack: A retracing of the antipodes. Sydney: Univ. of New South Wales Press.

Gamache, R. (2010). A history of sports highlights: Replayed plays from Edison to ESPN. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co.

Hughson, J., Inglis, D., & Free, M. (2005). The uses of sport: A critical study. London: Routledge.

Kahle, L. R., & Riley, C. (2004). Sports marketing and the psychology of marketing communications. Mahwah, NJ: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Masteralexis, L. P., Barr, C. A., & Hums, M. A. (2005). Principles and practice of sport management. Sudbury, MA: Jones and Bartlett.

Morgan, M. J. J., & Summers, J. (2005). Sports marketing. Southbank, Vic: Thomson.

Raney, A. A., & Bryant, J. (2006). Handbook of sports and media. Mahwah, N.J: L. Erlbaum Associates.

Rosner, S., & Shropshire, K. L. (2011). The business of sports. Sudbury, MA: Jones & Bartlett Learning.

Shoham, A., & Kahle, L.R. (1996) Spectators, viewers, readers: communication and consumption communities in sport marketing. Sport Marketing Quarterly, 5, 11-20.

Skinner, P. (2007). Sports photography: How to capture action and emotion. New York: Allworth Press.

Westerbeek, H., & Smith, A. (2002). Sport business in the global marketplace. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

 



[1] While commercial interests can help to develop these communities, they cannot be easily manufactured. (Westerbeek & Smith, 2002, p. 167)

[2] Kahle & Riley (2004) in their work later suggest losing sport teams may want to encourage their fans to engage in this type of behavior. (p. 75) During the research done in this dissertation, there was no evidence Australian sport organizations were actively doing this.

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Sport in Australia

Posted by on Friday, 8 July, 2011

One of the pieces of advices by one of my supervisors was to add an overview and history of sport in Australia.  This section should be before any definition about fans in order to familiarise any potential non-Australian assessors with the sporting situation in Australia.  The section below is the first draft attempt at doing that. It probably needs more sources.  I debated including aboriginals and their history of sport in the Australian context.  The problem is that the group does not appear to have a huge impact on online fandom, and their sports that pre-existed European occupation didn’t get adopted by the Europeans.  Aboriginal fans exist but mostly in the context of the European based sport culture that Australians adopted.  Hence, their exclusion.

Sport in Australia

Sport is an important part of Australian culture, life and the nation’s history. (Cashman, 2002)  In trying to understand the country, it is important to understand sport because of those connections and the importance of sport to the nation’s identity and for the identity of many individual Australians. (Adair & Vamplew, 1997)

At the time of Australia’s European colonization, sport had taken an almost religious quality among the British.  Several sports, including cricket, had been recently codified, making it easy for sports to grow and become spectator events.  Sport was not a motivating factor in the country’s colonization, but it was quickly seen as a way by the British establishment as reinforcing British cultural ideals. (Cashman, 2010, p. 11)  Early Australian sport also served an important survival role, with sports like hunting and fishing to help supplement early food supplies, and racing of horses and boats helping relieve mental tedium. (p. 12)

Sports that were popular amongst early Australian convicts included boxing, wrestling and cock fighting.  Boxing was one of the first sports to receive media attention in the country, with the Sydney Gazette covering some bouts and expressing concerns about the impact of blood sports on the colony. Popular sports in the early 1800s included swimming and boat racing. (Cashman, 2010, p. 14)

While convicts played sport, the military that was charged with supervising the colony also developed their own sporting traditions.  Sports they participated in included horse racing (Cashman, 2010, p. 15) and billiards. (p. 16) The military helped to spread cricket during the 1830s in cities like Melbourne, Sydney and Hobart. (p. 16) They also helped to spread rugby during the 1860s. (p. 16)

Free Australian settlers during the 1820s to 1860s played a variety of sports including cricket, lawn bowls, billiards, boxing, athletics, horse racing, wrestling and shooting. (Cashman, 2010, p. 18)  Much of this early sporting culture was centered around pubs and drinking establishments, places that served as vital community centers in the early history of European settlement of Australia.  Many of these sporting events were spectator ones, attracting a large number of male watchers but very few female spectators. (p. 18) Premiere sporting events of the day could attract crowds as large as 10,000. (p. 19)  By the mid-nineteenth century, publicans could no longer afford to run sporting establishments out of their pubs.  In other cases, sport governing bodies began to be established on a local and state level that further removed the pub from the center of sport organization in Australia. (p. 19)

Australia’s culture of sport clubs began as early as the late 1820s with the founding of Sydney Turf Club in 1825. (Cashman, 2010, p. 19)  The very influential Melbourne Cricket Club was founded in 1838. (p. 20)  These clubs reflected the ethnic, social and political climate at the time based on membership, who was allowed to join and who was not, which clubs they competed against and which ones they did not. (p. 21)

Media coverage of sport started by the 1820s.  It covered the social impact of sport related gambling, blood sport, events to entertain the local population, and the facilities available for sport.  This coverage remained limited until the 1850s, when sport only publications were first published in the colony. (Cashman, 2010, p. 22)

Early history of European Australian women’s sport involved women participating in separate facilities in urban areas as they were excluded from participating along side men. Women were also generally excluded from being spectators in men’s sports that were viewed as violent or affiliated with pubs.(Cashman, 2010, p. 23)

Australia’s culture of sport punters and spectator sport was well established by the 1850s. (Cashman, 2010, p. 24)  Alcohol was firmly established as part of the sport culture for players and spectators. Participation existed on formal and informal levels.  Gambling was an important component of Australian sport.  International sporting competition was of equal importance to other levels of sport in the country.  (p. 24) The major spectator sports of the country that would help further define national identity had been introduced including horse racing, cricket, Australian rules football, and rugby.  The culture of sporting celebrity was in place. (p. 25) School and university sport emerged on the Australian sport scene by the 1850s, which would help to further team sports as spectator and participation sports in Australia and reinforce the regionalism of some sports such as rugby and Australian rules. (Cashman, 2010, p. 28)

Spectatorship has remained high in Australia, though the demographics of who watches have changed from the early days when women were excluded.  In 2005-2006, 36.9% of all Australian women and 51.9% of all Australian men attended a sporting event. 52.6% of all Australian women aged 18 to 24 attended a live match, the highest of any female age grouped measured. For men, the highest rate was 62.1% for men aged 25 to 34.  Spectatorship rates are higher outside of the capital cities for both genders:  51.0% in capital cities to 53.5% outside capital cities for men, and 35.6% for women in capital cities and 39.2%  for women outside capital cities. The greatest rate of spectatorship is for Australian born with 50.2% having attended a sporting event, compared to 42.1% of citizens born in other English-speaking countries and 21.2% of citizens born in non-English speaking countries. (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007)

Spectatorship by sport in 2005-2006 was highest with Australian rules with 15.8% of the total population having attended a match.  The next most popular sport was horse racing at 12.5%, followed by motor sports and rugby league at 9.3%, outdoor cricket at 4.6%, rugby union at 4.3%, and 3.5% for soccer. When broken down by gender, Australian rules is still the most popular with 12.5% having attended a match. Horseracing is second with 11.2%, rugby league third at 6.7%. motor sports fourth at 4.7% and rugby union fifth at 2l9%.  For men, Australian rules tops with 19.2%, horse racing second at 13.8%, motor sports third at 13.0%, rugby league fourth at 12.0%, and outdoor cricket fifth at 6.9%. (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2007) By 2009-2010, these numbers had not changed much.  Overall, when men and women are combined, Australian rules and horse racing stayed number one and number two: Australian rules saw an increase of 0.4% in attendance and horse racing saw a decline of 1.4%. Rugby league was no longer tied with motorsports, both sports seeing decreases: Rugby league to 8.9% and motorsports to 8.1%.  Soccer jumped above harness racing and rugby union, with a 1.9% increase in attendance, while harness racing cost 0.7% attendance and rugby union lost 1.0%. (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011)

Television viewing has become an important component of modern sport culture.  Prior to 2009, the Australian Football League (AFL) had historically held higher aggregate television ratings than the National Rugby League (NRL) in terms of total viewers for all events connected to each league.  In 2009, for the first time, the NRL beat the AFL on a season aggregate with 128.5 million total viewers compared to the AFL’s 124.3 million viewers when pay and free-to-air television were combined. (Newstalk ZB, 2009)

As discussed above, participation is a defining characteristic of Australia’s sporting culture.  Data provided for 2009-2010 by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2011) breaks participation down by gender and sport/form of exercise.  For men, the most popular form of exercise is walking at 15.6% of the total Australian male participation, followed by aerobics at 11.2%, cycling at 8.2%, jogging and golf at 7.5%, swimming and diving at 6.4%, tennis at 4.4%, soccer at 3.7% and cricket at 2.8%.  For women, the most popular form of exercise is 30.0%, aerobics at 16.7%, swimming at 8.4%, jogging at 5.6%, cycling at 4.9%, netball at 4.6% and tennis at 3.6%. (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2011) Spectatorship and participation are not closely aligned.

Sponsorship continues to play an important role in modern Australian sport.  Sports have historically attracted sponsors that give ideas about Australian culture on a wider level.  For cricket, Australian rules football and rugby league, alcohol companies have historically been major sponsors.  This includes sponsoring events in Australia as recently as 2006, when alcohol sponsorship had been restricted or banned in countries such as the United Kingdom. Sponsorship by alcohol related companies is limited to certain sports, with the Australian Olympic Committee and Australian soccer on the A-League and federation level all managing to survive without it. (Jones, 2010, p. 258)

Historically and in the present, there are a few important characteristics of Australian sport: High rates of participation and spectatorship, sport being important to the culture, and sponsorship playing an important role in supporting sport in the country.

 

 

 

References

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2007, January 25). 4174.0 – Sports Attendance, Australia, 2005-06. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Retrieved July 5, 2011, from http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/DetailsPage/4174.02005-06?OpenDocument

Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2011, April 13). 4156.0 – Sports and Physical Recreation: A Statistical Overview, Australia, 2011. Australian Bureau of Statistics. Retrieved July 5, 2011, from http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/Latestproducts/A25E5C7B8769217BCA25787000149D37?opendocument

Cashman, R. (2002). Sport in the national imagination, Australian sport in the Federation decades. Sydney: Walla Walla Press.

Cashman, R. (2010). Paradise of Sport. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Jones, S. C. (2010). When does alcohol sponsorship of sport become sports sponsorship of alcohol? A case study of developments in sport in Australia. International Journal of Sports Marketing & Sponsorship, 11(3), 250-261. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Newstalk ZB. (2009, December 21). League: Rugby League outrates AFL for first time ever in Aussie | LEAGUE News. Breaking & Daily News, Sport & Weather | TV ONE, TV2 | TVNZ. Retrieved July 5, 2011, from http://tvnz.co.nz/rugby-league-news/league-becomes-australia-s-top-sport-3315931

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Review of literature first complete draft rewrite

Posted by on Friday, 24 June, 2011

Not sure I have enough sourcing for this… but think this is headed in a much better direction than the previous version.


Review of Literature

The sport community is not inert.  The community is constantly moving, responding to changes in the competition ladder, to player news, to championships, and to other events that take place inside the community.  The composition of teams change, new athletes emerge, people become fans and then change their sporting allegiances.  This can happen over the course of a day or can happen over the course of years.

The sport community exists on several level with several groups in terms the sport community‘s composition.  The first group and level that receives the most attention involves the team and its athletes. A second group that sport exists is in the media.  The media is a key component for sport existing outside of participation only: The media helps make sport a spectator sport. A third level that the sport community exists is with sport administration.  These are the people who set the matches, who get the sponsors, who find the facilities and who work towards finding the money to help keep the team in existence or allow an athlete to compete. A fourth level of sport community exists based on sponsorship and commercial interests outside the team directly. A fifth level of the sport community involves the local community: The people who live in the surrounding area around which the team is named, where the team or athlete trains, facilities the team owns or competes in, where athletes are from. A sixth level exists in the sport community that is composed of the community of fans.  Each of these groups has different concerns and their own agenda.  They attract different people to analyze them.  Each of these groups have different issues that are the primary concerns: Some groups are interested in making money.  Others are interested in improving a team or athlete’s performance.  Other groups are interested in bonding and creating a sense of group identity.  Sometimes, these concerns are not exclusive to the concern or two the group.  The needs and concerns of each individual group make it hard to address the sport community as one cohesive collective.

The sport community is always moving in time.  What time is a major issue?  The sport community does not have one timeline but many timelines that reflect the differences in the groups that make up the broader sport community. One timeline is a competition timeline: When does the athlete or team compete?  Another timeline is a training timeline.  Still yet, there is a media timeline for when it is best to publish a story in order to attract the widest possible audience.  There is also a timeline for sport marketing that relates to selling tickets and sponsorship.  A timeline exists for planning and organizing a sport competition. There is a timeline that involves the available funds for being a spectator.  There is a timeline for being a media consumer. There is a timeline for responding to a media crisis regarding an athlete’s non-sport related behavior.  Some of these timelines may be as short as five minutes.  Other parts of these timelines may last several years. In general, these timelines are short term, middle term and long term. The timelines do not always run parallel to each other and may intersect in places that cause difficulties for other groups.  One timeline may cause another timeline for another group to be started in response.

The issues of sport related communities and their subgroups, coupled with timelines that these groups are involved with, makes it a challenge in terms of finding the appropriate literature when addressing more than one at a time and using a historical, fixed in time approach to analyzing actions in the sport community.  This situation exists for Australia, New Zealand and other English speaking sport communities.

The relationship between the larger sport community and events in time has largely not been explored by existing sport research, especially as it pertains to fans in regards to medium term events.  The lack of research in this area in Australia appears to exist for a variety of reasons.  One of the most obvious of these is that, until the rise of the Internet, sport fans views and activities were mediated almost exclusively through three different groups: Sport organizers, sport sponsors and other corporate interests, and the media.  This mediation was necessary for fans because their voices as a unified body could only be heard on a select basis during select events that had a direct impact on them, such as the situation where the Melbourne Football Club was part of a proposed merger with the Hawthorn Football Club in 1996.  In other situations, fans as a group were subsumed by other interests to the point where their collective identity belonged to that of another group.  This is the case for many AFL and NRL cheersquads. When fans as a group are not having their views mediated another group, their views are often shown as a point of conflict: Fans versus sponsors or fans versus corporate interests of a team or fans versus an athlete.  Beyond the issues of the collective fan experience and views being mediated by other groups or shown only to highlight conflict is that when fans are the focus, they tend to be examined on the short term or the long term.  There is an absence of examination as it pertains medium term events or the medium term and long term response to a short term event.  This absence is also partly the result of other groups in the sport community and those groups own goals and timelines specifically as they pertain to sport fans or the specific lack of interests in fans as they pertain to their objectives.  The fan experience being mediated and the time issues result in little research in this area.

The situation involving the lack of literature about fan responses to short term and medium term events may be symptomatic of the multiple fields and approaches to analyzing the wider sport community.  There are several disciplines involved in researching the wider sport community and specific groups in the sport community for certain time periods.  Beyond the area of their research focus, these researchers are also writing for different audiences.  There are sport marketers who often focus their research interests on fans and the community, but with a goal of helping sport organizations.  There are sport historians that often focus on an athlete, a team or participation on a community level.  On the whole, fans are not the primary focus of these narratives.  Sport historians write for a variety of audiences, including sponsors, sport administrators, other historians and fans. There are newspapers, magazines and television programs who cover sport and sport fans.  The primary objective of these publications is often to create a story to help them sell newspapers, magazines and commercials.  Thus, coverage of many aspects of sport on the management level, community level, sponsorship level and fan level are dependent on sales, not the value of the topic in terms of informing the public. Sport sociology often focuses on narrative aspects of the fan experience using qualitative research.  This narrative experience and qualitative research can make it difficult to identify and report on behavioral trends in the fan community over the short and long term as the research is generally not couched in this understanding.  Sport sociology also suffers in that it tends to focus on identity, sometimes coupling it with actions.  Popular culture studies occasionally mentions sport fans but this is often done by removing sport from the equation, or casting sport as a narrative form where on-field performance and other external factors do not play a role. This type of research also tends to focus on fan production.  This makes it difficult to discuss sport fans in the short and medium term because the short term is defined as a game or single competition and the long term is defined as a season.  The focus does not tend to deeper to explore group actions, but instead appears to focus on identity. Sport tourism is similar to sport marketing, and tends to have a very specific timeline.  Like other areas, sport fans are looked at based on the needs of other groups.  When the internet is brought into it, there are a variety of research perspectives that are extremely valuable to sport fans but, like other areas, focus on sport fan and the community as secondary to other purposes and sport related groups.  This is the case for research related to reputation management, which focuses on how to respond when a crisis occurs.  Another Internet perspective is a usability marketers, who try to determine how to improve traffic to their websites in the short term.  This focuses on extreme short-term actions based on sport fan interactions while visiting a site controlled by another group in the sport community.  All of these groups of academics and researchers have issues when it comes to understanding the sport community in a wider context, understanding sport fans on a timeline and showing an understanding of how sport fans respond to events.

These issues all demonstrate problems with existing research as it pertains to the focus of the research in this dissertation.  It also highlights a wider problem of understanding where understanding of sport fans fall in academic disciplines and inside the wider sport studies community.

 

 

 

 

Spectators

Spectatorship plays an important role in understanding the sport community and has since Greek times. Its role has been questioned and often found confusing. (Levinson & Christensen, 1999, p. 373) Anacharsis asked Solon in the Works of Lucian (2009) by Lucian, “Why do your young men behave like this, Solon? Some of them grappling and tripping each other, some throttling, struggling, intertwining in the clay like so many pigs wallowing.”  Anarcharsis’s question related not to spectators but to sport participants.  Solon and Anarcharsis then discuss the importance of physical exercise and the importance of spectatorship in terms of what it does for the people, with Anacharsis having said:

Why, Solon, that is just where the humiliation comes in; they are treated like this not in something like privacy, but with all these spectators to watch the affronts they endure — who, I am to believe, count them happy when they see them dripping with blood or being throttled; for such are the happy concomitants of victory. In my country, if a man strikes a citizen, knocks him down, or tears his clothes, our elders punish him severely, even though there were only one or two witnesses, not like your vast Olympic or Isthmian gatherings. However, though I cannot help pitying the competitors, I am still more astonished at the spectators; you tell me the chief people from all over Greece attend; how can they leave their serious concerns and waste time on such things? How they can like it passes my comprehension — to look on at people being struck and knocked about, dashed to the ground and pounded by one another.

The concept of spectatorship has been explored by the Greeks and many modern sport journalists and sport academics for a long time. Historical changes in spectatorship and spectator composition are rarely explored in texts that focus on fans.

 

Cashman (2002) is a sport historian who teaches at the University of New South Wales. In examining fans, he focused on more on the connection between Australian sport and other issues in Australian life including identity, culture and parallel Australian history. Cashman rarely uses the term fan.  Words like crowds, interest, Australian with adjectives further identifying spectator culture and sport participants are used instead.   Spectatorship is a component of identity and community.  The timelining for the development of identity and changes in the community are not explored.

Adair and Vamplew (1997) are sports historians who tried to debunk some historical myths about sports culture in Australia.  One of these myths involved the defining of Australians as sports obsessed.   This definition, where fans were defined as people obsessed with sports, was reinforced by talking about match attendance compared to the total population, and by the consumption of sport on television.  The authors did not explore what factors led to changes in spectatorship and television consumption, nor the characteristics of fans.

Hess (2000) is an academic at Victoria University.  He wrote about the history of female fans of Australian rules football.  In his text, he offered a topology of the female fan types.  These included women as passive onlookers, voyeurs, socialites, barrackers, civilizers.  Hess (2000) claims it is possible to “categorize female spectators on the basis of their behavior and their seating arrangements” (p. 127) but “it should also be noted that it was certainly acceptable for different social groups of women to be present at football games”. (p. 127) Female sport fandom, using Hess’s model, is contingent on motivation to attend and based on being spectator.  It does not offer an exploration based on a timeline.

Television viewing of sport could be described as a form of spectatorship, with the total number of viewers impacting a sport organization’s financial standing.  Earnheardt (2010) wrote about fans, as defined by television sports viewers, and their sport viewing habits in response to news stories about athlete criminal and anti-social behaviors.  Earnheardt (2010) discovered that certain populations responded to these stories differently than others.  Acknowledging that not all sport television viewers are part of fandom and that women are less inclined to self identify as sport fans, the author found that women who were not dedicated fans who did not generally watch much televised sports and were less motivated to watch televised sport paid more attention to news stories about athletes criminal activity and drug use.  This led to negative perceptions of the athletes involved and a prediction that such fans were less likely to watch televised sport events that featured anti-social athletes. The problem with Earnheardt’s research is it depended on survey research, user responses to identify their level of fandom and report their response to hypothetical situations.  It was not based on case studies to gauge sport television viewing in the wild, using Nielsen ratings. The research does not appear to have been supported by later actual case studies.

 

 

 

Sport organizations

 

Shilbury, D., Quick, S., & Westerbeck, H. (2003) are sport management and marketing academics based out of Deakin University.  They published a book about sports marketing.  Much of the content is focused on fans from the perspective of generating revenue for a club, league or sport and converting online fans into spectators and consumers of merchandise related to the organization and its sponsors.  Fans are largely examined in the context of mediating how the actions of fans can help a sport organization accomplish its own goals. Any timeline mentioned for action for fans is also mediated based on an organization’s needs.

Sullivan (2004) wrote for an audience of potential sport marketers.  The author said “the term fan will be used in the broadest sense and will, therefore, imply a range of attachments.” (p. 131) Sullivan then characterized fans as spectators and consumers of various media who could be profiled using three key factors: Geographic, demographic and behavioral factors.  The discussion around these factors involved how they impacted the potential for spectatorship and the consumption of media related to a team.  Again, a sport marketer defined sport fandom as being mediated by how a sport organization can profit from them.  There is also an implication of fans behaving individually, on their own timelines based on their own behavior, rather than fans acting as a group in response to an event with their own timeline that cannot be controlled by a club.

Nicholson (2004), a sport management academic at La Trobe University, wrote to reflect on the problems the AFL faces in becoming a national game.  The geographic population imbalance between clubs in Queensland and New South Wales compared to Victoria was a major problem: The league was not balancing team location with population areas, nor was it financially sponsoring player development.    The author rarely used the word fans to describe these problems: Spectators, the market and television audience are used instead. Fans interests are again mediated by sport organization interests and as a component of community.

In Urge to Merge,  Ridley (2002) examined the merger proposal between the Hawthorn Football Club and the Melbourne Football Club.  The book mentions almost all parts of the whole sport community as it pertains to these particular clubs. Fans are mentioned as part of this.  The author talks about them as supporters or as club members.  A clear picture of how fans responded to a merge proposal is done: Many were angry and wanted management to resign as a consequence to the proposal.  The book is one of the few sources that involves a non-pitch related, multi time period response to actions taken by clubs, management, and players.  The fan experience is not mentioned frequently.  On another level, because the Ridley was involved in the administration of a club, the whole book is mediated from that perspective as his interactions color his views of fans as independent actors.  Beyond that, fans were mediated through members, people who have a financial investment with one of the clubs involved.

 

The Media

Rowe (2005) talks about the role of sport journalists, and if their work is more akin to being a fanclub than a form of journalism. Rowe argues that in contemporary society, newspapers and other media organizations face a battle between providing entertainment, informing readers and offering an important critique of what takes place in society. This battle is highlighted in media coverage of sport. Sport journalists are on one hand expected to provide impartial and accurate accounts of matches. On the other hand, journalists are celebrated for cheering for their clubs, and acting as “partisan sport supporters.” (Rowe, 2005, p. 126) Rowe (2005) says, “Sports-people, therefore, can be regarded as mobile canvases onto which fans project their aspirations, fantasies and identities.” (p. 127) Sports journalist can be seen as expressing their fandom by reporting on their team. This aspect of journalists as fans who express their interest through reporting can mean that serious sport related investigations that may harm a team may not be done, as sport journalists do not feel they have the time, nor inclination to do this type of research. (Rowe, 2005, p. 130) In Australia, this situation is particularly bad where many journalists see themselves as belonging to a fanclub related to the sport, league or club. (Rowe, 2005, p. 131) The closer sport journalists are to a team, by being in a smaller market or in a single team market, the more pressure journalists feel to write from the perspective of fans. (Rowe, 2005, p. 132-134) This pressure can be more intense when the publication is a major sponsor of a local club side. (Rowe, 2005, p. 132-134) Rowe confirms that the media mediates fan views and implies that the media have a timeline that may be separate than that of other parties in the sport community, based on their need to deal with multiple parties including the team, sponsors, and the community.

Favorito (2007) says the Internet is a platform that allows “casual fans to connect with their individual favorite athlete more regularly.” This direct connection can be detrimental to the media as it allows other groups, such as sponsors and the team, to cut them out of the loop. It also potentially means that the media timeline may be more dependent on that of other parties.

Sponsors

Cordaro (2011, June 21), an account manager for web analytics company Compete, provides an example of analyzing sport fan behavior as a group in response to events. The research contextualizes daily official website traffic volume and interest in team related merchandise against winning a major sporting competition using several tools.  It shows that winning a major championship gives a boost to traffic and interest in getting team related merchandise.  Beyond that it, it shows a spike in interest in the opposing, losing team that is not sustained after the team fails to win. The only major problem with this research in terms of understanding fan behavior is that the research interests could be said to be mediated by sponsor or potential sponsor interest as the post was done with the intention of helping to promote Compete’s service by showing the value of Compete’s data.

 

Community

The scholarship and popular culture studies around professional sport as a function of community rarely focus on the demographic characteristics of the fans traversing in that space.  Time is not looked at as a function as one approach to do community involves embedding oneself in the community.  The experience is the thing, not understanding the wider context in which the events happen. Kaduk (2006) used just such an approach when he moved into Wrigleyville to better understand the neighborhood and its relationship to the Chicago Cubs, a Chicago based professional baseball team.

Davern and McCarthy (2010) wrote a children’s books about being a Chicago Cubs fan.  It explores the idea of being a fan from the perspective inheriting allegiance from family.  While written for children, it mirrors Kaduk’s work in that it places team fandom in a community perspective and includes spectatorship as a component of fandom and community.  This texts like other texts does not acknowledge that who fans are change, nor at the timeline of how sport fandom around a team changes.

Stewart is an Australian rules historian and academic, and his work is often useful in the context of providing sport management students historical context for future management decisions. Stewart (1983) wrote for an audience of VFL fans, while providing a great deal of information regarding the organization of the league, its financial situation and other information that would be of more interest to people interested in sports marketing.  Fans are frequently described using community-based concepts like proximity to stadiums, training grounds and the location found in a team’s name.   These community-oriented descriptions were used to explain the potential for spectatorship: “The Club has little local support — there are few private dwellings in the vicinity — and most of its supporters are centred in the outer south-eastern suburbs.” (p. 41) In a few cases, fans are all described based on their economic status and how fans of other teams perceive them: “It is thought that while the affluent eastern suburbs residents are appreciative of the team’s success, they prefer to spend Saturday afternoon in active leisure activities like tennis or gardening.” (p. 40)  Stewart (1983) did provide historical information about changes in the community over time, did not explain the methodology in reaching the conclusions about fans that he did, and he did not provided detailed information about the characteristics of fans.  He treated fans as community members.

Fletcher (2010) cites anthropologist Bea Vidacs as saying that sport needs to be contextualized into the society that sport is played to understand why fans sport the clubs they do.  Fletcher places importance on understanding why people support the clubs they do, outside of inherent assumptions about identity.  He contextualizes the ethnographic data to better understand the changes in sporting allegiances against other social and cultural changes that took place in South African society.  Fletcher’s approach can provide context for these changes using long-term timelines, with the fan experience being mediated alongside the community.  It does not allow for short and middle length events.

Why does the research on sport often ignore the sport fan community and the spectator community, especially as these groups behave in time?  One rational is offered by Brewer (2002), a cycling researcher, who makes a connection between the conflicts in sport community over the growth of commercialization. (pp. 272-278)  Brewer (2002) never mentions fans.  Instead Brewer (2002) focuses on the impact over time that commercialization of sport had on competitors in terms of cheating and performance enhancing drug use.

 

Fans

 

Collins (2005), a professor of social history at Leeds Metropolitan University, wrote for an audience interested in the history and evolution of several football codes in Australia.  In describing a proposal to merge rugby league with Australian rules football, the different codes were described as appealing to two different views about Australia’s place in the world: transnational versus nationalistic.  Sport fans are treated as their own group but the concept of time, event responses and changes in the fan community over time are not discussed.

Stewart (2005, p. 117) wrote for an audience Australian sport historians interested in the Australian Football League.  In this work, for this audience, he referred to fans based on their sense of identity, their relationships with management and the behaviors they expressed.  He did not refer to fans based on how fans behaved in response to events.

Reysen and Branscombe (2010) sought to explore the differences and similarities between sport fans and other fan groups like media fans and music fans from a psychology perspective. The results found they were similar, with both groups defining their fan status based on identity, personal traits and membership to a group. (p. 190) The research did not look at sport fan or non-sport fan as dependent or arising from events; it almost exclusively focused on relationships and identity to in-groups and out-groups.

Popular culture studies academics also look at sport fandom. Jenkins is a Provost Professor of Communication, Journalism, and Cinematic Arts, a joint professorship at the USC Annenberg School for Communication. Hills is a reader in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Cardiff. While both have occasionally written about sport fandom, it is not the focus of their research.   Rather, their research involves media fandom.  In this context, these scholars define fans as an active population who engage in activities related to an object produced by the larger popular culture.  This production includes activities like writing fan fiction, creating costumes, producing fanvids and organizing conventions.  The act of production helps in constructing a new identity. (Bennett, 2010) Hills (2009) uses this definition of sport in an article about radio fandom when writing for other academics about how radio fandom is marginalized inside media fandom studies.  He describes radio fandom based around an online community for Terry Wogan’s Radio 2 breakfast show, Wake up to Wogan.  The description focuses on the creation of a specific culture on a specific fansite for the show and discusses how the community organizes internally.  The relationships in the article are premised as being “spectators” of the show, but deviates in that “spectatorship” is secondary to group interactions amongst fans and the separate culture they have created that connects to but is distinct from the show.  In the context of sport, both Jenkins and Hills examine fan interactions with fans.  Neither discuss how membership in the sport community is impacted by external events, and how external events help in organizing a community internally.

The Canberra Times (2009, September 12) defined fandom based around personal identity of individual fans.  They reference scholars who talk about supporting a club being similar to having religious experiences.  The article goes on to talk about how modern fans express their identity.  The actions they describe are fixed in short term expressions of allegiance: Buying and wearing a jersey, attending a match, crying or cheering depending on a club’s performance.  The article does not talk about fandom as an expression of time, what events bring people into fandom or cause them to leave.

Monteverde (2010, October 11) wrote about the Harry Kewell’s fans in the Courier Mail (Brisbane).  The talks about how fans responded to Kewell’s performance at two specific events: An A-League match and the World Cup, not on fan allegiance across Kewell’s career. Fan responses happen over a very narrow timeline: A pass, a block, a tackle. Time is a factor in how fans are discussed in this work but not in a way that can provide meaning to what being a fan is.

The Gold Coast Bulletin (2010, October 9) described fans using a short-term indicator of Melbourne Heart fans getting heart when the Heart beat the Melbourne Victory. The Central Coast Express Advocate (2010, October 8) also used fans in a context of an extremely limited time period when the newspaper talked about how fans had been promised that the pitch would be in good condition for an A-League match. Garvey (2010, October 10) in The Sunday Age had an article titled, ” ‘Rekindled’ does enough to keep his fans interested.”  These references all treated fans as an independent group inside the larger community, and they all discussed fans around short term events.  None give a clear idea how fans move as a group into and out of fandom.  Rather, to a degree, they re-affirm loyalties being reaffirmed.

Cheersquads have played an important role in Australian rules football and date back to the 1880s. Cheersquads would create giant paper banners with inspirational messages for players to run through. (Andrews, 2005) Cheersquads also waved giant floggers. (Andrews, 2005) These were eventually phased out and replaced with patties, giant pompons on a small stick. (Andrews, 2005, p. 88) The 1970s saw a decrease in the ability of cheersquads to make and display signs as they interfered with signage by advertisers at the park. (Andrews, 2005, p. 84) By the 1980s and 1990s, fan control of cheersquads had been severely diminished as clubs and the leagues exerted increasing influence over them. (Andrews, 2005, p. 83)  The cheer squad as an independent, non-corporate mediated fan community appears to have long since ended and any examination of this fan group cannot be done isolation.

Expressions of fan allegiance often have a time related component attached to them. Up until roughly thirty years ago, if the Collingwood Magpies performed poorly, local residents would not buy The Sporting Globe. (Shaw, 2006, p. 117) The morale of the city of Geelong is said to be dependent on the club’s performance. (Shaw, 2006, p. 116) During the 1920s, the North Melbourne Kangaroos were called “The Shinboners” because, according to Shaw (2006, p. 83), many fans from the area the team drew from were butchers and “would attach royal blue ribbons to animals’ shinbones and use them as window displays before North Melbourne home games.” (Shaw, 2006, p. 83) According to Stewart (2005, p. 128), Hawthorn Hawks fans were so opposed to a proposed merger with the North Melbourne Demons that some traveled from Tasmania for the merger meeting. These expressions of fan allegiances are often community based, with an underlying assumption time based events may impact mood but do not challenge or result in shifts in allegiance.

Wearing a jersey could be seen as a time related response to an event on the part of fans. According to the Canberra Times (2009, September 12), in Australia, demonstrating allegiance to a rugby club by wearing a team jersey is a relatively new expression. Prior to this change, wearing a jersey was rather taboo. This demonstration of allegiance came into being as a club’s fan base decentralized and was less structured around a specific geographic area.  Despite the possible time related context for jersey wearing, Canberra Times article did not mention it. Others have made a clear connection between events and fan related responses to them. McHugh (2011, June 6) gave an example of Cleveland Cavaliers fans burning Lebron James jerseys in 2010 after James announced his departure for Miami. Manfred (2011, June 13) also referenced the James jersey burning. The jersey burning is an extreme version of jersey wearing in relation to a sport related event.  It is a fan event that is not mediated by other groups.  Outside of mass media sources, this particular aspect of sport fandom related to jersey wearing and destroying as a time related event appears to be ignored.

Sport fanzines can be a source of unmediated fan content and insight into fan activities.  Wilson (2005) has explored Australian AFL fanzine production. The author does not contextualize this production around events taking place in the wider sport community.

Online analysis of sport fans may provide the best insight into how fans respond to events though little actual research appears to have been done to provide such insight. Berg and Harcourt (2008) talk about how analysis of sport fandom online offers what cannot be done in other situations: providing context for sport fan behavior. Berg and Harcourt (2008) also claim that studying sport fandom online also helps to give a “more well-rounded understanding of sports fandom and its expression by illuminating new areas for understanding and for studying both online and offline fandom.”  Behaviors, not identity issues, connect to actions, and thus can be better understood in context of events that behaviors happen in response to.

 

 

 

References

Adair, D. & Vamplew, W. (1997). Sport in Australian history. Melbourne: Oxford University Press.

Andrews, A. (2005). “Taming the cheersquads.” In M. Nicholson (Ed.), Fanfare, spectator culture and Australian rules football, Australian Society for Sports History (pp. 83-98). Melbourne: Australian Society for Sports History.

Bennett, C. (2010). Flaming the fans: shame and the aesthetics of queer fandom in Todd Haynes’s Velvet Goldmine. Cinema Journal 49(2), 17-39. Retrieved August 18, 2010, from Project MUSE database.

Berg, K. & Harcourt, A. (2008). “Let the domination begin” : sports fans’ construction of identity in online message boards”  In Hugenberg, L. W., Haridakis, P. M., & Earnheardt, A. C. (Ed.), Sports mania: Essays on fandom and the media in the 21st century. Jefferson, N.C: McFarland & Co.

Brewer, B. (2002). Commercialisation in professional cycling 1950 – 2001: Institutional transformations and the rationalisation of “doping”. Sociology of Sport Journal, 19, 276-301.

Canberra Times. (2009, September 12). Canberra Times: wild ride for sports’ biggest fans. Canberra Times (Australia) n.pag. Retrieved October 10, 2010, from NewsBank on-line database (Australia’s Newspapers)

Cashman, R. (2002). Sport in the national imagination, Australian sport in the Federation decades. Sydney: Walla Walla Press.

Central Coast Express Advocate . (2010, October 8). Fans promised `exceptional’ surface. Central Coast express advocate (Sydney, Australia) (1 – Main Book ed.), 071. Retrieved October 10, 2010, from NewsBank on-line database (Australia’s Newspapers)

Cordaro, M. (2011, June 21). Boston Raises the Cup and Web Traffic. Compete Pulse — Online Marketing Insights. Retrieved June 22, 2011, from http://blog.compete.com/?p=8924

Davern, S., & McCarthy, B. (2010). Grandpa is a Cubs fan, daddy is a Cubs fan, I am a Cubs fan. Chantilly, VA: Mascot Books.

Earnheardt, A. C. (2010). Exploring Sports Television Viewers’ Judgments of Athletes’ Antisocial Behaviors. International Journal of Sport Communication, 3(2), 167-189. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Favorito, J. (2007). Sports publicity: a practical approach. Sport Management in Practice. New York City: Butterworth-Heinemann.

Fletcher, M. (2010). ‘You must support Chiefs; Pirates already have two white fans!’: race and racial discourse in South African football fandom. Soccer & Society, 11(1/2), 79-94. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Garvey, A. (2010, October 10). ‘Rekindled’ does enough to keep his fans interested – first past the post – racing. Sunday age, The (Melbourne, Australia) (First ed.), 16. Retrieved October 10, 2010, from NewsBank on-line database (Australia’s Newspapers)

Gold Coast Bulletin. (2010, October 9). Melbourne – duel gives – fans Heart. Gold Coast bulletin, The (Australia) (1 – Extra 1 ed.), 121. Retrieved October 10, 2010, from NewsBank on-line database (Australia’s Newspapers)

Hess, R. (2000). ‘Ladies are specially invited’: women in the culture of Australian rules football. In J. Mangan & J. Nauright (Eds.), Sport in Australasian society, Sport in the global society (pp. 111-141). London: Frank Cass.

Hills, M. (2009). From BBC radio personality to online audience personae: the relevance of fan studies to Terry Wogan and the TOGs. Radio journal: international studies in broadcast & audio media, 7(1), 67-88. doi:10.1386/rajo.7.1.67/1.

Jenkins, H. (2006) Convergence culture: where old and new media collide. New York: New York University Press.

Kaduk, K. (2006). Wrigleyworld: A season in baseball’s best neighborhood. New York: New American Library.

Lucian of Samosata. (2009). The Works of Lucian. (H.W.Fowler & F.G. Fowler, Trans.), Adelaide, South Australia: University of Adelaide. (Original work published in 1905). Retrieved June 9, 2011, from http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/l/lucian/works/complete.html#chapter43

Manfred, T. (2011, June 13). NBA Finals: Now That The Miami Heat And Lebron James Lost, It’s Time For Cleveland To Get Over It. Business Insider. Retrieved June 22, 2011, from http://www.businessinsider.com/nba-finals-miami-heat-lebron-james-cleveland-2011-6

McHugh, D. (2011, June 6). Cleveland sports fans apparently still dislike Art Modell 15 years later. ABC2NEWS.COM – WMAR-TV. Retrieved June 22, 2011, from http://www.abc2news.com/dpp/sports/football/ravens/cleveland-sports-fans-apparently-still-dislike-art-modell-15-years-later

Monteverde, M. (2010, October 11). What’s all the fuss about? – quiet game, but Harry’s fans don’t care. Courier Mail, The (Brisbane, Australia) (1 – First with the news ed.), 072. Retrieved October 10, 2010, from NewsBank on-line database (Australia’s Newspapers)

Nicholson, M. (2004). “Take the game to the north: the strategic and demographic imperative facing Australian rules football.” In M. Nicholson, R. Hess, & B. Stewart (Eds.), Football fever: grassroots (pp. 111-121). Hawthorn: Maribyrnong Press.

Reysen, S., & Branscombe, N. R. (2010). Fanship and Fandom: Comparisons Between Sport and Non-Sport Fans. Journal of Sport Behavior, 33(2), 176-193. Retrieved from EBSCOhost.

Ridley, I. (2002). Urge to merge: the power, the people, the president, and the money. Melbourne: Crown Content.

Rowe, D. (2005). Fourth estate or fan club? Sports journalism engages the popular. In S. Allan (Ed. ), Journalism: critical issues, Issues in Cultural and Media Studies Series (pp. 125-136). Sydney: McGraw-Hill International.

Shaw, I. W. (2006). The bloodbath: the 1945 VFL grand final. Melbourne: Scribe.

Shilbury, D., Quick, S., & Westerbeck, H. (2003). Strategic sport marketing (2nd ed.). Crows Nest, New South Wales: Allen & Unwin.

Stewart, B. (1983). The Australian football business, a spectator’s guide to the VFL. Maryborough, Victoria: Kangaroo Press.

Stewart, B. (2005). Channeling passion or manufacturing identity?  Managing fans in the Australian Football League. In M. Nicholson (Ed.), Fanfare, spectator culture and Australian rules football, Australian Society for Sports History (pp. 109-124). Melbourne: Australian Society for Sports History.

Sullivan, M. (2004). “Sports marketing.” In J. Beech & S. Chadwick (Eds.), The business of sport management (pp. 128-153). Essex: Pearson Education Limited.

Wilson, C. (2005). ” Football fanzines, A view from the outer.” In M. Nicholson (Ed.), Fanfare, spectator culture and Australian rules football, Australian Society for Sports History (pp. 99-108). Melbourne: Australian Society for Sports History.

 

 

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Sport studies: Where do fans fit into the academic model?

Posted by on Friday, 17 June, 2011

I’m thinking of putting this as the introduction for my literature review. After this section, then start actually examining what the sources elluded to here actually say.  (It stills needs a huge amount of editing if I do go with this.)


The sport community is not inert.  The community is constantly moving, responding to changes in the competition ladder, to player news, to championships, and to other events that take place inside the community.  The composition of teams change, new athletes emerge, people become fans and then change their sporting allegiances.  This can happen over the course of a day or can happen over the course of years.
The sport community exists on several level with several groups in terms the sport community‘s composition.  The first group and level that receives the most attention involves the team and its athletes. A second group that sport exists is in the media.  The media is a key component for sport existing outside of participation only: The media helps make sport a spectator sport. A third level that the sport community exists is with sport administration.  These are the people who set the matches, who get the sponsors, who find the facilities and who work towards finding the money to help keep the team in existence or allow an athlete to compete. A fourth level of sport community exists based on sponsorship and commercial interests outside the team directly. A fifth level of the sport community involves the local community: The people who live in the surrounding area around which the team is named, where the team or athlete trains, facilities the team owns or competes in, where athletes are from. A sixth level exists in the sport community that is composed of the community of fans.  Each of these groups has different concerns and their own agenda.  They attract different people to analyse them.  Each of these groups have different issues that are the primary concerns: Some groups are interested in making money.  Others are interested in improving a team or athlete’s performance.  Other groups are interested in bonding and creating a sense of group identity.  Sometimes, these concerns are not exclusive to the concern or two the group.  The needs and concerns of each individual group make it hard to address the sport community as one cohesive collective.
The sport community is always moving in time.  What time is a major issue.  The sport community does not have one timeline but many timelines that reflect the differences in the groups that make up the broader sport community. One timeline is a competition timeline: When does the athlete or team compete?  Another timeline is a training timeline.  Still yet, there is a media timeline for when it is best to publish a story in order to attract the widest possible audience.  There is also a timeline for sport marketing that relates to selling tickets and sponsorship.  A timeline exists for planning and organising a sport competition. There is a timeline that involves the available funds for being a spectator.  There is a timeline for being a media consumer. There is a timeline for responding to a media crisis regarding an athlete’s non-sport related behaviour.  Some of these timelines may be as short as five minutes.  Other parts of these timelines may last several years. In general, these timelines are short term, middle term and long term. The timelines do not always run parallel to each other and may intersect in places that cause difficulties for other groups.  One timeline may cause another timeline for another group to be started in response.
The issues of sport related communities and their subgroups, coupled with timelines that these groups are involved with, makes it a challenge in terms of finding the appropriate literature when addressing more than one at a time and using a historical, fixed in time approach to analysing actions in the sport community.  This situation exists for Australia, New Zealand and other English speaking sport communities.
The relationship between the larger sport community and events in time has largely not been explored by existing sport research, especially as it pertains to fans in regards to medium term events.  The lack of research in this area in Australia appears to exist for a variety of reasons.  One of the most obvious of these is that, until the rise of the Internet, sport fans views and activities were mediated almost exclusively through three different groups: Sport organisers, sport sponsors and other corporate interests, and the media.  This mediation was necessary for fans because their voices as a unified body could only be heard on a select basis during select events that had a direct impact on them, such as the situation where the Melbourne Football Club was part of a proposed merger with the Hawthorn Football Club in 1996.  In other situations, fans as a group were subsumed by other interests to the point where their collective identity belonged to that of another group.  This is the case for many AFL and NRL cheersquads. When fans as a group are not having their views mediated another group, their views are often shown as a point of conflict: Fans versus sponsors or fans versus corporate interests of a team or fans versus an athlete.  Beyond the issues of the collective fan experience and views being mediated by other groups or shown only to highlight conflict is that when fans are the focus, they tend to be examined on the short term or the long term.  There is an absence of examination as it pertains medium term events or the medium term and long term response to a short term event.  This absence is also partly the result of other groups in the sport community and those groups own goals and timelines specifically as they pertain to sport fans or the specific lack of interests in fans as they pertain to their objectives.  The fan experience being mediated and the time issues result in little research in this area.
The situation involving the lack of literature about fan responses to short term and medium term events may be symptomatic of the multiple fields and approaches to analysing the wider sport community.  There are several disciplines involved in researching the wider sport community and specific groups in the sport community for certain time periods.  Beyond the area of their research focus, these researchers are also writing for different audiences.  There are sport marketers who often focus their research interests on fans and the community, but with a goal of helping sport organisations.   There are sport historians that often focus on an athlete, a team or participation on a community level.  On the whole, fans are not the primary focus of these narratives.  Sport historians write for a variety of audiences, including sponsors, sport administrators, other historians and fans. There are newspapers, magazines and television programs who cover sport and sport fans.  The primary objective of these publications is often to create a story to help them sell newspapers, magazines and commercials.  Thus, coverage of many aspects of sport on the management level, community level, sponsorship level and fan level are dependent on sales, not the value of the topic in terms of informing the public. Sport sociology often focuses on narrative aspects of the fan experience using qualitative research.  This narrative experience and qualitative research can make it difficult to identify and report on behavioural trends in the fan community over the short and long term as the research is generally not couched in this understanding.  Sport sociology also suffers in that it tends to focus on identity,  sometimes coupling it with actions.  Popular culture studies occasionally mentions sport fans but this is often done by removing sport from the equation, or casting sport as a narrative form where on-field performance and other external factors do not play a role. This type of research also tends to focus on fan production.  This makes it difficult to discuss sport fans in the short and medium term because the short term is defined as a game or single competition and the long term is defined as a season.  The focus does not tend to deeper to explore group actions, but instead appears to focus on identity. Sport tourism is similar to sport marketing, and tends to have a very specific timeline.  Like other areas, sport fans are looked at based on the needs of other groups.  When the internet is brought into it, there are a variety of research perspectives that are extremely valuable to sport fans but, like other areas, focus on sport fan and the community as secondary to other purposes and sport related groups.  This is the case for research related to reputation management, which focuses on how to respond when a crisis occurs.  Another internet perspective is a usability specialist, who looks at how a website is users, where people click.  This focuses on extreme short term actions based on sport fan  interactions while visiting a site controlled by another group in the sport community.  All of these groups of academics and researchers have issues when it comes to understanding the sport community in a wider context, understanding sport fans on a timeline and showing an understanding of how sport fans respond to events.
These issues all demonstrate problems with existing research as it pertains to the focus of the research in this dissertation.  It also highlights a wider problem of understanding where understanding of sport fans fall in academic disciplines and inside the wider sport studies community.

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Rethinking my literature review

Posted by on Tuesday, 14 June, 2011

Totally rewriting my review of literature. I’m not certain this is the best idea but I’m going to do it anyway. :/ I’m looking at the dissertation of some one who did sport tourism. Their dissertation is about 250 pages. Their review of literature eats up pages 26 to page 108. This seems really long. Mine was much shorter and my methodology was much longer than their methdology. This all tends to make me insecure.

What I think I am going to do with my review of literature is reorganise and rewrite the damned thing into the following sections:

  • Sport sociology
  • Sport tourism
  • Sport marketing
  • Fans and the media
  • Popular culture studies
  • A definition of sport fandomEach section will look at how sport fans are treated by that group, how those groups depict fans and explain how fans respond to events taking place in their community and then come up with a definition for fans. I’ve got the latter, minus sport tourism. I’ve come to the conclusion that for at least one chapter, the one on bicycling, I can’t find sources talking about its characteristics in the traditional sense because they use sport fandom type phrases that I know but talk about fandom in a way that is more participation for cycling than I see for Aussie rules football. The goal is say have people fly from Melbourne to Perth to compete in a bicycle event, than it is to have people fly from Melbourne to Perth to watch Lance Armstong or Cadel Evans. That’s why I feel like they need to be there. Still, hugely yeah. I have the sources to do that… but just a bit scary to need to do that rewriting and no clue how it will come out.

    The historical information about the sport teams that I have I think I will move into mini literature reviews about a team that preface the larger results chapter. So the chapter about AFL team characteristics will be a microchapter in front of the first major chapter about the AFL. The NRL information will be in front of the first major chapter about those teams.

    Hoping that by doing this I will address comments by my upgrade assessors and my supervisors.

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    It’s not my job to fix your problem: re: Wikiversity and Wikipedia

    Posted by on Saturday, 4 June, 2011

    I have issues with Wikiversity and Wikipedia.  There is stuff I’d like to do on Wikipedia.  A lot of this stuff has to do with content and public visibility.  The problem is that the backend of both Wikiversity and Wikipedia have cultural and demographic problems.  When I talk about using Wikipedia and Wikiversity and a need to externally organise information and create spaces along side them to do internal projects on them, I often feel like I’m being advised to ignore what I see as a need to create a safe organising off those sites and instead use them.  I can’t.  There are just too many issues with them involving lack of female participation, lack of female administrators, a prevalence of women who prefer working with men to the exclusion of women, an abundance of people who think if you can’t survive the rough and tumble nature of Wikipedia you shouldn’t be editing it, organisational bias in favour of men, an inability to do original research (on Wikipedia), a lack of project wide ethics standards (on Wikiversity), inability to lock pages to allow them to maintain their integrity, lack of a community for the topic I’m working on already existing on these sites.  These are all huge hurdles.

    I can think of ways to address them while having project needs met off WMF.  People appear to suggest that if the above are issues, I shouldn’t create space off Wikimedia Foundation projects to overcome these shortcomings but rather, I should spend my time fixing what is wrong with Wikipedia and Wikiversity to meet my goals.  I don’t want to do that.  I don’t care to do that.  It is not my job to fix those problems.  It isn’t even my concern.  My concern in this particular case is how to best promote research into neglected women’s sport histories.  Wikipedia and Wikiversity are tools, community and content that would be available to this project.  It isn’t the be all and end all goal.

    If Wikiversity and Wikipedia want to attract academics and get more projects to consider using these sites as the primary bases for research centres that support open content and open communities, it is their job to fix these problems or to work with people who would like to use them but aren’t currently doing so.  It isn’t mine: Mine is content and history and a completely different community than WMF.

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    Popular cultures studies is not the right approach to understanding sport fandom online

    Posted by on Wednesday, 30 March, 2011

    In my lit review for my dissertation, I’m going to have to spend more than three paragraphs dismissing the work of popular culture studies as inappropriate for my analysis.  The problem is that I’m going to get at least one assessor who is from communications and popular cultures, or at least familiar with that type of analysis.  (And if I really, really wanted to, I could bug my department or supervisor to get me one of the prestigious guys and see if they wanted to assess it.  The problem is that they might very well fail me for not following the particular line of that academy.)

    My arguments against this type of analysis tend to be that it is inappropriate for my subject matter.  My research does not focus on the relationship between the fan and the text.  In this case, the athletes competing at the sporting event.  If I’m looking for a relationship between parties involved, it would probably be between fans of several types on the scale of fan type and the management of team.  This is the case for situations like Jason Akermanis, the Melbourne Storm, the courtship of Greg Inglis and St. Kilda.  It also likely is the case for situations where we look at the following patterns on sites like Twitter and Facebook.  (The research is quantitative.  You cannot determine the motive for following and most accounts provide extraneous information largely unrelated to the text unless text is widely defined.)  Another case probably looks at the selection process for information by interested parties: The relationship between fans and the texts they seek meaning about sport stories from.

    Most of the research in sports is done from a sociological point of view that understands the fan perspective based on a fan’s relationship with other fans and a fan’s own sense of identity.  The body of work done in sport cultures is just unique from that of popular culture.  For example, football hooliganism material that I’ve read has largely ignored a team’s performance as the integral aspect of understanding football hooligans.  It gets mentioned sometimes, but its importance if often low down on the list of priorities.  In some cases related to football hooliganism, a team’s victories or losses seem to be an excuse for certain types of behaviour, not the contributing factor (of a fan’s relationship to the text) for acting out violently.

    Television, movie, music and theatre fandom do not appear to have the same cultural patterns surrounding them that sports has to deal with based on the notion of a team being the text.  Are those four communities largely defined in the media by their ability to perform relative to other texts of the same type, with plans placing weight on beating one team over another?  No.  The Melbourne Storm’s loss of points and inability to compete for the premiership does not have a parallel in television, movie, music or theatre fandom.  If a film was stripped of its academy awards (how would that even happen?) or a television show stripped of its Emmys or  a musician of their Grammys or a theatre production of its Tonys, the impact would be much less damaging.  In fact, some of these popular culture products may be “complete” so the impact on advertising dollars or ticket sales would likely be minimal for the producers.  The direct competition aspect really changes the nature of the text.

    Television, movie, music and theatre fandom are also largely uninherited allegiances: People do not become Harry Potter fans because their grandmother was a fan and their father was a fan and the Harry Potter fan would be unlikely to pass their allegiance to their child who have a lifelong allegiance and sense of identity around the team.  There would unlikely be the same sense of betrayal felt if a person switched their allegiance and identity from Harry Potter to Twilight: These changes from one fan group are much more accepted in television, movie, music and theatre fandom because so much of what happens is not mediated through core personal identity.  Thus, it is another example of the popular culture model not being appropriate for sport.

    The last argument I can think of involves cultural studies focus on production.  Sport fandom, on the whole, involves fewer acts of production that are shared in the same way that television, movie, music and theatre fandom share.  Fan fiction is not an important component of sport fandom.  Costuming is not defined the same way.  (How does one costume as a sport fan?  That’s generally viewed as buying a jersey, which ties in more to merchandising than it does into costuming.)  Some other aspects of sport fandom are culturally acceptable and not necessarily viewed as distinct acts defining sport fandom.  When the city of Chicago puts a Cubs hat or a White Sox hat on a Picasso statue, that is a large act of production but not necessarily a fandom one.  Rather, it is seen as being about community support, marketing for the city as a whole, community identity that almost transcends sport.  Sport fandom also has the issue that fanzines and other explicit production activities take a back seat to things like tail gating and watching the game.

    This is all wrapped up in the other issue in that on social media sites, it is harder to differentiate the fan archetypes or to assume that all sport fans following a team are involved with production.  A case could more easily be made for this on sites like FanFiction.Net for media fandom.  Social media is a great equalizer to this degree and you cannot separate out the fan types based on viewing patterns or follow patterns.  Thus, it feels dangerous to assume that social media behaviours are typed up to production on sites that are not fundamentally about production.

    Now I have to find the sources to demonstrate some of the above and figure out how to integrate it into my dissertation.

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    Did netball originate from American basketball or American women’s basketball?

    Posted by on Monday, 21 March, 2011

    I’m in the process of working with a few individuals to get good article status for the netball article on Wikipedia.  I had hoped to be able to write this process up once the article had gotten there.  Normally, the process takes about a week.  (Assuming the article has appropriate scope and is completely cited, it shouldn’t have huge fixes and should require only minor revisions that would take no longer than a week.)  This isn’t the case.  At the moment, we’ve got an American reviewer who is rather insistent that American women’s basketball be incorporated into the article in greater detail.  This has led an interesting question: Did netball derive from American basketball that was being played by both men and women during the 1890s, or did netball derive from a totally unique sport of American women’s basketball?  Parts of this debate can be seen in the good article review and on the talk page in the women’s basketball section.

    I’m firmly in the camp that the sources appear to suggest that netball originated from the sport of basketball, not from an American women’s game of basketball.  Most of the sources I’ve seen have indicated that the game was brought over by British women who saw the men’s game or the earliest version of basketball before men and women’s basketball went on separate trajectories to become different games (before becoming one game again at a later date).

    Rather than rewrite what I’ve already written, I’m just going to copy and paste from what I posted on Wikipedia: McIntosh says: “Madam Osterberg had heself introduced the American game of Basketball to her Hampstead College and to this country. Her students developed Netball from it. It was found to be suited to the grounds of a country house and flourished in the new setting.” That is on page 292. On page 293, it says “C. Lawrence and M. Hankison, E.R. Clarke and E. Adair Impey, for example, were key figures in establishing of national governing bodies for women in Hockey, Lacrosse an Netball respectively, and in general the Osterberg Girls were to play collectively, a role in women’s sports not unlike that of the A.P.T.C., through the years, in the corresponding areas for men.” That’s page 293. The reference refers to the game as American. To a degree, this is also supported by the All England Netball Association Golden Jubilee book: “1895: Visit of Dr. Toles, an American, to Madame Osterberg’s P.T. College (then at Hampstead). Students were taught Basket Ball — indoors — no printed rules — no lines, ircles or boundaries. The goals were two waste paper baskets hung on walls at each end of the hall.” Also on page 13: “1897: Game played out of doors on grass. An American lady paid a visit to the College (moved to Dartford), and taught the game as then played by women in American. The students at Dartford introduced rings instead of baskets, the larger ball and the division of the ground into three courts.” These two quotes from the All England Netball Association demonstrate the game that they learned was Basket Ball, or basketball. There is no clear indication that American women were playing a distinct form of Basketball, that had separate and unique rules that were different than the game being played by men. Hence, the use of Women’s Basketball as a distinct sport unique from Basketball is inappropriate and causes confusion. Women’s Basketball is also used as the official name of the sport in New Zealand and Australia until 1970. Using the term Women’s Basketball, with out some mention that the term “women’s basketball” is another name for netball, adds unwanted confusion and can be clarified by doing away with women as an adjective, especially as the idea that women’s basketball that netball came from is not supported in earlier references.

    Netball traces its roots to basketball. Humberstone says on page 11: “Before we turn to the sport as we know it today, it is worth looking at its originas. It is an offshoot of basketball, the game founded by Dr James Naismith at Springfield College, Massachusetts. Two Englishwomen watched a game at the YMCA in Springfield and immediately saw the possibilities for their own sec. They returned home and developed a set of rules more suitable for the less robust female competitior who, in those days, was regarded as a rather frail and timid person.” This source explicitly says that netball was derived from watching a men’s game.

    Buchanan and Slottje talk about the early history of basketball. On page 3, they say “In the beginning, basketball was actually played within the confines of a steel cage. Furthermore the ball was never out of bounds. Players would simply bounce off the sides of the cage.” Later in that same paragraph they say: “In fact the game originally had a nine man format but in 1897 was set at five.” The nine-a-side reference supports the idea that women and men played a similar game at the time with similar rules.

    Colbeck also point to similarities between what would become netball in the early rules of basketball. On page 12: “It was once the practice for the game to be restarted at the centre after each goal; now the ball is put into play immediately by the defending team.” On page 15, Colbeck says that “The game bust be played indoors or out, thus tackling must be forbidden, and to offset this, running with the ball must also be eliminated.” Early basketball had no dribbling, a characteristic found in netball today. The original rules for the game are found on page 16. The rules do not exclude either gender from participating. This was different from netball, which at the onset did not permit men to compete.

    According to Hollander on page 5, “Naismith envisioned the new sport as a mass game, in which any number of players could participate.” This suggests that Naismith did not envision the game as being played exclusively by males. The players were playing basketball. On page 6, it says : “Girls got involved in basketball almost at the game’s beginning. In March, 1892, a match pitted a team of local Springfield girls against a squad of women teachers. Naismith apparently liked what he saw at the game because he married one of the players, Maude Sherman. Vassar and Smith, both women’s colleges, added basketball to their activities in 1892.” There is no suggestion that basketball at this time had become two separate sports in the United States. There is no suggestion that women played using modified rules. (In fact, it appears that there were collegiate basketball teams for women before there were collegiate basketball teams for men. On page 7, the first men’s collegiate team was created in March 1893 at the University of Chicago.) While on page 225, Hollander says: “Women have been playing basketball since 1892, a year after the game’s invention. But the game they played differed greatly from the men’s. Early rules called for nine women to a side, each confined to an area, with the ball passed from area to area before a shot.” This passage does not indicate when separate rules were created for women. (This is important. We know that netball was being played in England in 1895. With out a date as to when separate rules were created, we do not know what game the women watched. Netball sources do not indicate which gender that 1895 game drew inspiration from. Smith and Humberstone indicate the game they may have adapted to create netball was a men’s game.) At the same time, while women are separated, there is no indication that basketball played by women was viewed by players as a separate and distinct game in the United States basketball community: The texts indicate the game shared the same name and were viewed as two versions of the same sport.

    In 1996, Levinson and Christenson also fail to reference American women playing basketball under their own set of unique rules that differ from men as a the source of the game of netball in England. Their wording on page 683 says: “Netball was introduced from England in 1895 as the indoor game of basketball. The person responsible for this was an American educator called Dr. Toll, who was a visiting college of physical training in north London. Dr. Toll taught the female students how to play basketball, but she did not distribute a book of rules and the playing area was of an indeterminate size. The goals were wastepaper baskets hung on the wall at each end of the hall. This very much mirrored Dr. James Naismith (1861-1939), who invented basketball in 1891 and who used peach baskets as his original scoring targets.” Levinson and Christenson trace the origins of netball to Naismith, not a later female America game that used its own unique rules. Later on page 683, the text says that in 1899, “a Ling Committee subcomittee drafted a set of rules that established a transatlantic compromise. Goals were to be replaced by points, and a shooting circle was introduced — these elements were part of the American game. However, the size of the ball (68 centimeters [27 inches] in circumference), was similar to the size of an English football and 4 inches less in circumference than the American “basketball.”" When they talk of a compromise between the two set of rules for the sport, the source refers to the American game as basketball, not women’s basketball or not American women’s basketball. This I believe supports my claim: The sport of netball traces its roots to basketball. If there was a unique women’s American sport called women’s basketball, it seems like it would be cited as the place where compromise was made.

    In 2005, Levinson and Christenson again trace the roots of netball to Naismith’s game on page 1066: “The goals were wastepaper baskets hung on the wall at each end of a hall — an arrangement the mirrored that of Canadian born Dr. James Naismith (1861-1939), who invented basketball in Massachusetts in 1891 and used peach baskets as his goals.” Both the 1996 and 2005 texts by Levinson and Christenson agree that the game invented in England and derived from American basketball was called “women’s basketball” in England until they made the switch to netball in 1899, when metal rings with nets hung below them replaced baskets. (Page 1067 for 2005, Page 683 for the 1996.)

    • All England Netball Association (1976). Golden jubilee : 1926 – 1976.. All England Netball Association. OCLC39500756.
    • Buchanan, Michael J; Slottjie, Daniel J (1996). Pay and Performance in the NBA. Jai Press Ltd. ISBN0762301848.
    • Colback, A.L. (1961). Modern basketball, a fundamental analysis of skills and tactics. Nicholas Kaye.
    • Hollander, Zander (1979). The modern encyclopaedia of basketball. Doubleday & Company. ISBN0385143818.
    • Levinson, David; Christenson, Karen. (1996). Encyclopaedia of world sport: from modern times to the present. ABC-CLIO, Inc.. ISBN 0874368197.
    • Levinson, David; Christenson, Karen. (2005). Berkshire encyclopedia of world sport. Berkshire Publishing Group LLC. ISBN 0974309117.
    • McIntosh, Peter C. (1968). Physical Education in England Since 1800. Bell. ISBN071350689X. OCLC41636.
    • Smith, Marian; Humberstone, Brian (1978). Netball, The Greatest Team Sport for Women. Cassell Australia. ISBN0726937193.

    What do you think?  Do you have any sources that support a claim that netball derived from an American women’s basketball?

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    Recommended reading: Fourth estate or fan club? Sports journalism engages the popular

    Posted by on Friday, 14 January, 2011

    Just something I found when trying to tidy up my review of literature.  I was actually looking for a citation and information on Australian cycling fandom when I found this…

    http://books.google.com.au/books?id=zJMNHctDmSYC&lpg=PA125&ots=cTnZYudsYc&dq=Australian%20cycling%20fandom&lr&pg=PA131#v=onepage&q=fandom&f=false

    Rowe, D. (2005). Fourth estate or fan club? Sports journalism engages the popular. In S. Allan (Ed.), Journalism: critical issues, Issues in Cultural and Media Studies Series (pp. 125-135). Sydney: McGraw-Hill International.

    That’s worth reading to better understand some of the media back story regarding how Australian sport journalism works.  It puts some things like #dickileaks, Joel Monaghan, the Melbourne Storm controversy into much better context in terms of the media coverage.

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    Revised draft: Dissertation introduction

    Posted by on Tuesday, 4 January, 2011

    When not trying to knock out various chapters in my dissertation, I’ve been working on editing existing chapter. My introduction has probably gone through about 10 different edits and while it hasn’t changed much in terms of organization and structure, I think it is a bit stronger now… and given those changes, I wanted to post it as a blog entry. It just is more there than if I just upload it as part of my draft.


    The online ecosystem is expanding the definition of sport fandom, changing how teams engage with their fans, and causing potential demographic and geographic shifts for Australian athletes, clubs and teams. These three components of sport fandom are inextricably linked and are worth studying to understand how sport fandom behaves and what Australian sport fandom will look like in the future.

    There are currently four operational definitions of sport fandom. Each definition originates from and is used by a different group based on the needs and interests of the group.

    Sports marketers and managers, broadly speaking, define sports fandom around potential for spectatorship. Stewart (1983), Shilbury, D., Quick, S., & Westerbeck, H. (2003) and Sullivan (2004) discuss various aspects of this, including the goal of teams to sell tickets to matches. They sometimes diverge from this definition to talk about spectator related behaviors that can be monetized including merchandise sales, radio listeners, and television viewership, as well as streaming online audio and video, and live game updates.

    Sociologists and historians offer the second definition. This group tends to define sports fandom as a form of identity and as a product of a specific culture. Cashman (2002) looks at sport fandom in Australia as an extension of a wider Australian national identity. Collins (2005) looked at sport as a component of people’s identity as it pertains to the rest of the world: Australian and inward looking or international and outward looking.

    Sport fans and the media provide a third definition of sport fandom. They define sport fandom around allegiances and in-the-moment activities that demonstrate these allegiances. This includes events such as having a sport club themed wedding.

    Popular culture studies scholars like Jenkins (2006) and Hills (2009) offer the fourth definition of sport fandom. Jenkins and Hills define fans as an active population who engage in activities related to an object produced by the larger popular culture. This production includes activities such writing fan fiction, creating costumes, producing fanvids and organizing fan conventions. Popular culture academics also define fans as possessing a sense of ownership of their product that is removed and distinct from the official one, that they view actors, athletes, copyrighted and trademarked materials as communally owned by fans.

    None of these definitions, perspectives in themselves, tells the whole story in the increasingly online-based world of Australian sport. Fans can more easily be monetized by teams that do not rely on getting people into the stadium. Identity continues to play a role in fandom but this is evolving as the Internet allows teams to draw a more interstate and international audience. In the moment activities can often extend out years as fans maintain large fansites and become more actively involved in organizations dedicated to but independent of their team. How fans express allegiance also is changing. No longer is it just based on club membership and being kitted out in a club’s jumper or scarf. Fans can and do express allegiance by following their clubs on social networks, checking in on geolocation based social networks, creating message boards and fan pages, attending events organized on social networks in order to meet their fellow fans, and creating content related to their clubs to distribute across various networks like Facebook, LinkedIn, LiveJournal, Twitter, and YouTube. How fans change their allegiances is changing. When fans stop supporting clubs online, they stop checking the club’s website regularly, unfollow them on Twitter or stop using Twitter altogether, do not post as often to team related fan sites and ignore team updates on Facebook.

    The definitional expansion means more fans than ever could potentially be counted as barrackers for a club. The potential exposure to a club is greater than ever as fans hear about teams and athletes from their friends, family and coworkers on social networks, as a result of online content that has gone viral, or seeking it out in response to major sport related controversies or events. The confluence of changing definitions and increased exposure to new sport potentially means that a sport or club has a different demographic population than the one historically associated with it. Why? The demographic characteristics of the Australian community are sometimes at odds with populations described by sport historians and sociologists. The exploration, for sport historians, as to why and how Australian sport communities function the way they do necessitates the benchmarking of the community as it exists in the period of 2010 and 2011 in order to observe the ongoing demographic changes in a club’s future fandom population.

    Hess (2000) and Cashman (2002) both elude to the traditional gender patterns of sport allegiances in Australia, with AFL, Australian Rules Football, generally having gender equity in their fan base. In contrast, the NRL, National Rugby League, is described by sport historians as being dominated by male barrackers, who compose 90% of the population. As the research will show, this has changed with some NRL clubs having a female fan base of around 40% while a new AFL expansion team has an initial online male fan base of 81%. These shifts and the causes for them are not explained in the literature that this dissertation will attempt to answer these questions.

    The study of sport fandom is grounded in sport sociology, history and culture. It is complimented by a framework of popular culture studies, sociology, history and other areas in social sciences.

    Much of previous research involving Australian sport fans, and specifically AFL fans, has focused on offline populations, and was conducted using survey research, observational work or historical work. This is the case for Stewart (1983) where the methodology was based on around club history and observations of match attendance. A population study done by the marketing agency Roy Morgan Research (2009) relied on a telephone survey. To the knowledge of this dissertation’s author, no large-scale study documenting the characteristics of Australian sport fans and why fans change loyalties has been completed. Studies that have been completed focus on attendance and club membership; this dissertation will examine internet data in an effort to determine how the internet affects these.

    Most social media research uses one or more of ten methodologies identified by the author of this dissertation. These research types are:

    1. Individual case studies involving how a business uses social media and the web;

    2. Search and traffic analytics analysis;

    3. Sentiment analysis and reputation management;

    4. Content analysis;

    5. Usability studies;

    6. Interaction and collaboration analysis;

    7. Relationship analysis to try to determine how people interact and to identify key influencers;

    8. Population studies;

    9. Online target analysis of behavior and psychographics; and

    10. Predictive analysis.

    These research methods have been used for analyzing online group behavior and content. The most popular methods include case studies, content analysis, usability studies, influencer identification, reputation management, and interaction and collaboration analysis. Based on my preliminary research, the last three are ones least likely to be done.

    When population studies are done, they tend to be short, do not detail methodology, focus on one particular site on the Internet and do not compare different populations. The reason for this is there are few automated tools to measure population characteristics of several sites at once. Of the existing tools, most are focused on providing information related to other methodologies including interaction and collaboration analysis, sentiment analysis, and search and traffic analytics analysis. These tools generally do not provide demographic and geographic population related data. Those that do offer demographic information tend to focus only on one site such as Twitter or Facebook, while this dissertation shall expand on those two.

    The existing methods and the reliance on automating data collection around a single site acts as an intellectual and practical barrier in doing large-scale population studies across multiple sites. My research will help provide a methodological framework for doing a population study online, and demonstrate how the three components of sport fandom are inextricably linked and will enhance the understand how sport fandom behaves and what Australian sport fandom will look like in the future. This methodology will encompass populations across different networks and subgroups as most current research focuses on Twitter, Facebook and club fansites. The framing of this research in the context of events that taking place in sport fandom will create a narrative that not only will help understand existing characteristics of a fandom but begin to explain why shifts in the fan population take place. The approach will be useful in terms of laying a framework exploring the methodology for online target analysis, psychographics and predictive analysis as it pertains to demographic and geographic characteristics. This methodology will further validate quantitative analysis as a valid method for understanding how fan communities function.

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