SOC 505 – Sociology of Sport

March 20, 2023

Eojin Lee
Sports, Celebrity, Identity and Social Media

Introduction
- Social media applications such as Facebook and Twitter – before, Instagram – have rapidly
permeated the sports world and by 2010-11 its influence became increasingly more pronounced.
- One of the more noteworthy trends emerging from this marriage is athletes using these
communicative channels to become more active media.
- This includes athletes optimizing self-presentation and projecting preferred identities to the
public, countering mass media framings and providing fasn with opportunities to validate these
identities (Jim Sanderson, 2008).
- Result: through social media, athletes promote and emphasize aspects of their identity that would
be difficult to transmit using traditional media channels.
- Purpose: what are some sociology-based ideas we can reference in contextualizing this use and
desired result?
- History: interesting is the fact that we are beginning this examination barely 10 years ago and as
such, we must actively work to rearrange our relationship to social media in order to understand
competently the role of social media for athletes today by looking to its history.
- Meaning: as is often the case, the world we may understand today as ideological and “the norm”
these norms are developed before we enter into the social media universe.
- For example, it is common sense that well-known athletes have “long” used social media to built
identities, personas and cultivate fan followings.
- For example, between 2005-15 Twitter was unquestionably the dominat social media employed
by celebrity-athletes.
- What is the dominant social media used by celebrity-athletes today? And what evidence can we
offer in defense of our claim?
Meaning, Reality and Truth: Theorizing on Reality, Truth , Copy and the Hyperreal
- According to David Harvey, although postmodernism is often thought of as challenging binary
oppositions, postmodernism itself also relies on the organizational structuring binary oppositions
provide.
- For example, modernism’s hierarchy against postmodernism’s anarchy, as well as critical
distance against active participation, creation versus deconstruction, genre boundaries versus
intertextuality, and “honesty” versus irony.
- One primary result of postmodernism’s advocating of new perspectives through which to
consume art and culture – popular culture – was a reluctance to continue neatly
compartmentalizing social and cultural texts as valuable or not valuable, or as important or not
important.
- For example, “that book is not important” or “that film is terrible” often revelas predetermined
judgements of a particular cultural text, expecting something to be valuable or otherwise based on
social narratives surrounding the text.
 - Terry Eagleton explains in After theory that “no idea is more unpopular with contemporary
cultural theory than that of absolute truth. The phrase smacks of dogmatism and authoritarianism”
(2003, 103). Eagleton then, like Stuart Hall, demands an active spectator,
- More specifically, understanding that popular cultural texts – an Instagram or TikTok page –
often arrive on our screens (before that, the cintema’s screen or novel’s page) with messages built
in compels the active spectator to be hailed – or called – into action in critically scrutinizing that
text.
- For us, a sociologists of sport, but also of social media, what are 3-5 primary questions we
address while critically examining a celebrity’s Instagram page, for example?
- That is, what compels you to examine and consider rather than consume and celebrate gazing
upon a celebrity’s social media page(s)?
- Or if we don’t care, why do we not care?
- In reference oto commercialized modernism – late 19 th to mid 20th century – Theodor Adorno and
Max Horkheimer’s critique of the “culture industry” contended that the Culture Industry (pop
culture) referred to the products of early CI such as film, radio and magazines as an early form of
cultural homogeneity and uniformity.
- That is, the goods produced within the Culture Industry were all predictably and essentially
identical and produced through mechanical reproduction simply reproducing “sameness”
- For example, pop culture that repeats itself – over and over and over.
- Various areas of popular culture, including sports culture, as well as film (media) genres such as
fiction and documentary film help situate our examinational framework.
- For example, popular culture industreis that indulge our desire for what is called hyperreality –
such as Disneyland and Las Vegas – alongside various theories used to examine popular culture
and postmodernism are scrutinized and explored in terms of our own presumption of reality,
popular culture and truth.
- And in particular, in terms of examining the complex nature of the “athlete, celebrity, social
media, reality” matrix.
Jean-Francois Lyotard, on Truth and Narrative
- To start, we consider JF Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition (1979), a text that propelled the
term postmodernism into general circulation
- The postmodern condition like an illness is marked by a crisis, only here “a crisis in the status of
truth, or singular truths, of modernism”
- More specifically, Lyotard argues “postmodernism calls into question all metanarratives and their
privileged truth to tell”
- Meta’s are totalizing forms of thought and belief: Canadian “values and culture”, communism,
religion, capitalism or “freedom”.
- What stereotypes have long existed in terms of sports, athletes, “jocks” and intelligence?
- Lyotard argues these meta narratives are social constructions (normalized ideologies) that operate
through inclusion and exclusion:
- For example, he argues that “metanarratives marshal us into ordered realms, silencing and
excluding oppositional voices and ideologies” and in this sense we return to “shut up and
dribble”, “keep politics out of sports” etc.
- Instead of this dogmatic thought process, Lyotard sees a positive in postmodernism as it is
marked by:
(a) A plurality of voices – we listen to many ideas
(b) A recognition of difference – sexuality, for example
 (c) A focus on multiplicity over universalit – Canada and multiculturalism, for example
Jean Baudrillard: on Reality
- For Jean Baudrillard, postmodernism is articulated through various explorations of reality. More
specifically, he argues that contemporary culture “is no longer a culture of any recognizable sign
or history, but instead a culture of simulations in which three levels of distance us from reality”
- According to Mark Poster, Baudrillard “appeals to those who would attempt to grasp the strange
mixture of fantasy and desire that is unique to late-20 th century culture” (1988).
- This culture is suggestive of the postmodern society we inhabit and Baudrillard critiques, one in
which the simulated experience of a day in “Paris” while at in Las Vegas is for some, a casual
reproduction of experiencing the “real thing” that is “close enough”, so to speak.
- That is, the continued development of technologically advanced production has impaired our
ability to distinguish between “original” in Paris and “copy” in Las Vegas and has culminated in
Baudrillard’s simulacrum: “an identical copy without an original.”
- The simulated experience of “a day in Paris”, complete with a replica Eiffel Tower, is
synonymous to experiencing the “real thing”
- Baudrillard draws a distinction between the real and simulation noting that simulation threatens
the distinction between true and false (Poster 1988: 168).
- “in the realm of the hyperreal, the distinction between simulation and the ‘real’ continually
implodes; the ‘real’ and the imaginary continually collapse into each other. The result is that
reality and simulation are experienced as without difference” (Storey 1993: 163).
- That is, the threat to the distinction between the “real” and “imaginary” culminates in that
distinction’s collapse, and the distinction is replaced by a hyperreal where the original and copy
cannot be differentiated.
Celebrity Athletes, Social Media and Self
- In simple terms, postmodernism’s challenge to truth claims and modes of representation enables
bridging the gap typically dividing documentary film as non-fiction (truth) and fiction film as
“make believe”.
- In terms of social media, if “the internet” is prone to manipulating the truth in terms of the
famous, the famous sees “the internet” as fiction and in turn may see their social media page as
non-fiction (truth)
- AS such then, explain how and why a celebrity athlete may agree with this claim and look to
social media as a “representation of self”?
- Additionally, bridging this gap between documentary and fiction film further illustrates the
theoretical underpinning at work setting up the so-called real against the so-called fake.
- Sociologist C. Wright Mills has identified celebrity as a central characteristic of contemporary
life, understood as a form of public honour, and unlike most other professionally ordained public
figures, the private lives of celebrities often produce greater interest and curiosity than their
professional lives (Mills, 1967).
- For example, in his influential work on celebrity culture, Stars, Richard Dyer (1979) states than
“[s]tardom is an image of the way stars live … it combines the spectacular with the everyday, the
special with the ordinary” (1979,35).
- Dyer also explains that while celebrities can be humanized by the media in interviews, the fans of
celebrities can never really know them because they are constructions themselves, their public
performances a tease, True intimacy alludes.
 - But then with rapidly developing modes of communication and the speed and ease of sharing
digital media in the early 21st century (i.e., through message boards, blogs, and social networking
sites like Friendster, Myspace, Facebook, Tumblr, Instagram, and TikTok), the allusive intimacy
that Dyer taled about was partially resolved.
- The Internet saw curiosity in celebrity lives ritualistically increase as images and information
became more and more available, and technology simultaneously ritualistically decreased the
theoretical space separating the lives of common people and the enviable lives of celebrities.
- Technology has granted access to the lives of celebrities previously unattainable – the first years
of the 21st century seeing the rapid rise of 24/7 paparazzi culture industries such as TMZ quickly
challenging the mundane nature of traditional evening celebrity coverage shows such as
Entertainment Tonight with its “live from the streets” coverage of celebrities outside the
manufactured and controlled environment of a formal interview.
- For example, TMZ in many ways pioneered capturing primarily young and newly famous 21 st
century celebrities while amidst everyday errands such as a trip to the grocery store, but also
occasionally in various states of disarray while leaving bars or nightclubs.
- These candid, “real” and occasionally inflammatory photographs proved to be popular with
viewers seduced by the non-scripted and tightly controlled nature of the images, as well as by the
rapid posting of the images, often the morning after the image had been captured.
- As the 24/7 TMZ model of “capturing reality” proliferated, the celebrity class morphed in a even
more powerful and influential commodity reflective of, and ultimately maintaining, a social
stratification that privileges the elite – a tiny percentage of people.
- The celebrity image then – seductive enviable and aspirational – sits neatly and securely at the
center of an identity marked by a slippery premise: a deception that falsely compels the non-
celebrity into equating the so-called “good life” with the elusive lives gazed upon in popular
culture.
- What are some sociological, ideological and theoretical issues here?
- The celebrities inhabiting the popular cultural elite corners of social media are the icons of
contemporary life, and they are “the deites of an entertainment society, in which money, looks,
fame and success are the ideals and goals of the dreaming” (Douglas Kellner, 2003).
- This embedding of celebrity culture into the dreams and fantasies of the mainstream has produced
numerous studies examining its meanings, production, and reception as well as celebrity as a
symptom of contemporary living in which representation and artifice has replaced reality as we
once knew it while “new media and especially the Internet (and now social media) have given
ordinary people greater access to platforms where they could become a celebrity.
Here I am: Amateur > Celebrity
- As Olivier Driessens outlines, “celebrification” captures the transformation of ordinary people
and public figures into celebrities, whereas ‘celebritization’ is a process that reveals the chagnign
nature (as well as the societal and cultural embedding) of celebrity (Driessens, 2012).
- That is, celebritization is less about an individual transaction but instead is more a reflection of
the systems of access attributed to gaining celebrity status.
- For example, popular culture’s celebrities are recognized “commodities” produced to act as the
labour ensuring the continued generating of financial profit. In this model, celebrity is looked
upon as a “cog in the wheel” of capitalism.
- Further, celebrification comprises the changes at the individual level, or, more precisely, the
process by which ordinary people or public figures are transformed into celebrities”
 - Celebrification then is not a singular transaction as the celebrity is now both a star in their field of
expertise, and by way of that stardom, a commodity, as well.
- Specifically, Richard dyer sees the celebrity figure as “both labour and the thing that labour
produces” (Dyer, 1986, 5); for example, the celebrity endorser.
- Who is a celebrity with a significant footprint as an active endorser?
- The individual’s role as a celebrity itself is in addition to the success within their field, it is
produced by the media and central to their role as a celebrity is as labourer: the act of performing
their celebrity in order to sell other commodities such as objects, goods and experiences.
- Finally then,
- Celebritization is less about an individual transformation, but more so a reflection of the systems
of access attributed to gaining celebrity status.
- It is a system that opens up some of those narrow cracks in the doors into celebrity and offers
competitive system of participation in this new internet driven game of “Who Wants to be a
Celebrity”
- In more direct terms, social visibility is a required prerequisite to achieving status while status
itself is a prerequisite to power, and the internet is ideally (a) democratic – access is open, (b)
diverse – we are all free to participate online, and (c) we have all migrated to a life online to some
extent, in particular young people such as those comprising the Millennial or Generation Z
demographics.
- Who can we articulate this as competition, labour and ambition?
Microcelebrity
- Microcelebrity consists of a set of personal strategies marked by a host of self-presentation
practices ritualistic to social media.
- It involves strategically formulating and constructing a social identity, or profile, that reveals
images and information illustrating the self while garnering attention in efforts to establish social
status.
- A salient feature of microcelebrity is the establishing of branded-self – an online identity
designed to command public consumption rather than reveal personal reflection.
- The branded-self not only plays to postmodern notions of identity marked by a concentrated
emphasis on construction, style, and engagement, but the branded-self also constructed a
narrative identifying that self as distinguishable from others and thus distinctive
- As Stuart Hall explained in various earlier modules, social beings learn the rules and conventions
of the systems of representation within a given culture through and understanding of media and
media’s role in providing representations that arrive at the viewer with prepared and preloaded
meaning(s).
- As such, Hall encourages the audience to adopt an active rather than passive role as consumers of
any given cultural text.
- In his canonical text, The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord sets the Spectacle as “a
monolithic communication system – an irresistible force of cultural hegemony that dominates
society from the top down” and he sees the following 4 components as the basis.
(a) Refers to the domination of media images and consumer society over the individual while
obscuring the nature and effects of capitalism.
(b) Operates as a tool that distracts and seduces people using the mechanisms of leisure,
consumption, and entertainment as marked by commodifiable media culture
(c) Social capital accumulated to the point where it becomes an image and represents the historical
moment at which the commodity comopletes its colonization of social life.
(d) Mediated and consumer society replace the “lived experience” as the passive gaze upon images of
status and lifestyle supplants active social participation, the appearance of mediation of
participation supersedes the actual participation in socialization in a classical sociological sense.