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Tucker Center Lecture w/ Blount & Ruggiero

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  • Tucker Center Lecture w/ Blount & Ruggiero

    I just wanted to bring this lecture to people's attention. Looks really interesting. I'll start some discussion about this below when I get a chance.

    Fall 2009 Distinguished Lecture

    "Facing Off Over Facebook:
    The Impact of Social Media on Women Sports"

    Monday, October 19 at 7:00 pm at the Hubert H. Humphrey Center on the West Bank

    panelists: Marie Hardin, Rachel Blount, Angela Ruggiero

    Over the past 30 years, scholars have documented numerous ways in which traditional sport media marginalize and sexualize female athletes. Into this vast—and influential—media landscape appears the recent and exponential explosion of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Will this technological paradigm shift challenge or reproduce the ways in which female athletes are traditionally portrayed in mainstream sport media? Will the unprecedented popularity of social media—and the alternative “ways of knowing” it provides to traditional media—fundamentally alter how we view women’s sports? Panelists with diverse experiences and perspectives will “face off” and take on these important and largely unexplored questions as we move into the Age of New Media.

  • #2
    Re: Tucker Center Lecture w/ Blount & Ruggiero

    This will be a mammoth post.

    Ok, so far starters, I think the question about what new media means for women's sports relative to old media is very interesting. I think it's premature though to frame the discussion simply in terms of jumping from old media to facebook/twitter/youtube. I think you first need to look at the jump from old media to internet media (sites like USCHO / streaming video / etc), and then look at what social networking adds on top of that. And before even looking at that, I think we need to state our views on (1) why female athletes are marginalized/sexualized and (2) why old media has propagated those views. Then we can get into (3) what did pre-facebook internet add to old media, and (4) what has social networking added to the internet.

    So for (1) why female athletes are marginalized/sexualized -- I don't know the academic literature here, but all I need to assert for the rest of this discussion is that there has been enormous discrimination in the past against female athletes, and certain social norms have resulted from that. Now we could discuss forever how the world got to be that way, but bottom line is discrimination has been a factor, Title IX (whatever its flaws may be) has helped move things in the right direction to reverse that discrimination, but change hasn't happened overnight. An opposing view I often hear is that it's inevitable female athletes will be marginalized because they're not as good as the men, but I think that's nonsense. Female athletes are most prominent in sports like Olympic figure skating and gymnastics where the tradition and social norms are there. Pro women's tennis -- the first pro sport to really succeed in achieving some level of equality for men and women -- is far and away more mainstream than other pro women's sports, and hopefully other younger pro women's sports are headed in the direction of women's tennis. So I think past discrimination is a factor for the state of the world now, Media can either serve to propagate the effects of that discrimination or be part of the solution instead.

    Now for (2) why does old media propagate negative views? Well, the obvious first answer is that the old media reflects the attitudes of the people that resulted from past discrimination, and the media then gives the majority what they want. I'd argue that old media in general is biased more towards maintaining the status quo. The simple reason is, if old media develops some cache/expertise in terms of covering the mainstream sports, why would they ever divert resources to cover emerging sports (which include most women's sports, because of past discrimination?) I think that's a more important explanation than claiming the problem is that there aren't enough female sports journalists. But whatever the explanation, the old media tends to "lock in" the status quo and slow down social change.

    So question (3) what were the effects of the internet relative to the old media? Well, it would be false to claim that some aspects of the internet don't continue to marginalize female athletes. ESPN.com for instance is still very much old media despite being on the web, and in some ways it's even further behind ESPN -- which gets GREAT television ratings ratings for the women's college softball world series (WCWS, better than the NHL ever got?) , but always gives the sport pithy coverage on its web site. If I go to a fan board for mainstream sports, like say Sons of Sam Horn (a Red Sox fan site), and try to talk about women's sports, I'll get a pretty negative reaction.

    That said, the internet does free society from the space constraints of printed newspaper pages, and allows for journalism to cater to particular interests that are not well served by the mainstream. Certainly USCHO is one example of this. To some extent this is the "long tail" concept that Chris Anderson popularized. And of course, streaming media allows fans to access games that didn't otherwise have any opportunity (although in many cases the games cost $7.95 and the quality stinks). So yes, while the internet allowed for some propagation of the status quo, it allowed good coverage of women's sports to reach a wider audience.

    Another interesting question is then whether good media coverage from the internet can then help propel these sports to the point where they get better attendance and then get better mainstream media coverage. I was optimistic this was possible earlier this decade, but now I'm more pessimistic. Now I don't know quite how the WCWS TV ratings grew like they did, but I have to think it was a result of ESPN getting behind it at some point more than its current ratings merited, and then it just took off. (Does anyone know more about the growth of WCWS ratings?) So that change has to come from within ESPN -- it wasn't some internet softball site that made it so. Sites like USCHO certainly allow people with common interests to connect and maintain those interest, but I don't think they've had a huge effect on mainstream attitudes or exponential growth in the an base of the sports they cover.

    Ok, FINALLY (4) the subject of the talk, what good is the new media /facebook/twitter/etc? I'll split this into two points.

    (A) These social networking sites of course enable fans to connect better with the athletes themselves. Fans can find out about an athlete, find them on twitter/facebook, get information straight from them, and not have to view them through the filter of the print media that has typically marginalized them. So it's obvious that this will be a huge improvement in the quality of information that public has about women's athletics.

    (B) Facebook/twitter/youtube allow the kind of internet media I discussed in section (3) to meet a much wider audience. So the problem with the sites I discussed in (3) influencing the mainstream is that they're all niche sites. However, facebook/twitter are more mainstream sites. So the point is, if there's a really good article on a niche site, no one might have read it in 2000, but it could in theory be spread far more rapidly through a social networking site among networks of friends. More succinctly put, social networking increases the connections between niches and the mainstream, and increase the rate at which these niches grow into the mainstream.

    As an example of this, I found about this lecture because I was linked to one of speakers on a social networking site.

    Thanks for sticking with me... or at least skimming this. Of course I'd be interested to know others' thoughts on this subject.
    Last edited by dave1381; 09-19-2009, 09:42 PM.

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