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‘All Avatars Aren't We’: Football and the experience of football-themed digital content during a global pandemic

This paper explores the contemporary nature of association football consumption. In particular, we argue that the coronavirus 2019 pandemic reveals the contemporary and particular nature of the relationship between football and its supporters, which is increasingly focused on the consumption of them...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Crawford, Garry, Fenton, Alex, Chadwick, Simon, Lawrence, Stefan
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE Publications 2022
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9019499/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35663793
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/10126902211021529
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author Crawford, Garry
Fenton, Alex
Chadwick, Simon
Lawrence, Stefan
author_facet Crawford, Garry
Fenton, Alex
Chadwick, Simon
Lawrence, Stefan
author_sort Crawford, Garry
collection PubMed
description This paper explores the contemporary nature of association football consumption. In particular, we argue that the coronavirus 2019 pandemic reveals the contemporary and particular nature of the relationship between football and its supporters, which is increasingly focused on the consumption of themed digital participatory experiences. During this pandemic, what fans missed was not only live football, but also the sporting ‘experience’ and the opportunities for participation that this provides. Hence, here we saw fans, clubs and media providers employing new digital technologies to create themed experiences that facilitated (and mediated) participation and interaction. Following Žižek (2014), we suggest that the coronavirus 2019 pandemic can be understood as a global mega event that creates a seismic, reality alerting schism, whose aftermath requires new ontologies and theories. Our response is to utilise a number of key and illustrative examples and to offer a new synthesis of theories and literatures, most notably, on the experience society, theming, participatory culture, neoliberalism and digital culture. This new context and (re)combination of theories then provides a new, and essential, perspective that reveals a great deal about the contemporary nature of the sport, what fans buy into, and also, how this may change post pandemic.
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spelling pubmed-90194992022-06-01 ‘All Avatars Aren't We’: Football and the experience of football-themed digital content during a global pandemic Crawford, Garry Fenton, Alex Chadwick, Simon Lawrence, Stefan Int Rev Sociol Sport Research Articles This paper explores the contemporary nature of association football consumption. In particular, we argue that the coronavirus 2019 pandemic reveals the contemporary and particular nature of the relationship between football and its supporters, which is increasingly focused on the consumption of themed digital participatory experiences. During this pandemic, what fans missed was not only live football, but also the sporting ‘experience’ and the opportunities for participation that this provides. Hence, here we saw fans, clubs and media providers employing new digital technologies to create themed experiences that facilitated (and mediated) participation and interaction. Following Žižek (2014), we suggest that the coronavirus 2019 pandemic can be understood as a global mega event that creates a seismic, reality alerting schism, whose aftermath requires new ontologies and theories. Our response is to utilise a number of key and illustrative examples and to offer a new synthesis of theories and literatures, most notably, on the experience society, theming, participatory culture, neoliberalism and digital culture. This new context and (re)combination of theories then provides a new, and essential, perspective that reveals a great deal about the contemporary nature of the sport, what fans buy into, and also, how this may change post pandemic. SAGE Publications 2022-06 /pmc/articles/PMC9019499/ /pubmed/35663793 http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/10126902211021529 Text en © The Author(s) 2021 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access page (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
spellingShingle Research Articles
Crawford, Garry
Fenton, Alex
Chadwick, Simon
Lawrence, Stefan
‘All Avatars Aren't We’: Football and the experience of football-themed digital content during a global pandemic
title ‘All Avatars Aren't We’: Football and the experience of football-themed digital content during a global pandemic
title_full ‘All Avatars Aren't We’: Football and the experience of football-themed digital content during a global pandemic
title_fullStr ‘All Avatars Aren't We’: Football and the experience of football-themed digital content during a global pandemic
title_full_unstemmed ‘All Avatars Aren't We’: Football and the experience of football-themed digital content during a global pandemic
title_short ‘All Avatars Aren't We’: Football and the experience of football-themed digital content during a global pandemic
title_sort ‘all avatars aren't we’: football and the experience of football-themed digital content during a global pandemic
topic Research Articles
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9019499/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/35663793
http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/10126902211021529
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