On the CBS broadcast of the Florida-Florida State football game:

"Well, Chris Rix beat the Gators last year with his legs, and this year he beat them with his arm."

The significance? The media matrix is composed of disembodied, and usually idealized, body parts: consider the myriad images of isolated washboard abs, curvaceous breasts, or taut glutes. Holism does not exist in this space. As a result, we consider others in these very terms, as a series of manufactured parts that may be leveraged in a production role.

Neale's (1964) "The Peculiar Economics of Professional Sports" is a classic in sport management, whose main contribution to the field lies in describing the nature of the professional sport product and how it contributes to a professional sports league's existence as a natural monopoly. It makes particular use of term "product joint", which describes how two firms (the teams playing in a sporting match) combine to produce a single product, namely, the sporting match itself.

Basically, in selling the sporting match to the consumer, one was selling the uncertainty of the game outcome: that is, sporting fans paid to see a decision of Truth, a determination of who was the winner and who was the loser. This is why the concept of a tie is so alien and distasteful in American sport: consumers don't feel they have received full value for their money. The American sporting establishment, with its linear mindset, has historically been focused on outcome rather than process, and if no (valid) outcome has been reached (ie. a tie), then the consumer leaves disgruntled with their "purchase".

This is one reason why soccer has never fully taken off in the United States (or Canada, for that matter). The paucity of goals and plethora of draws forces the fan to become an aficionado of the aesthetic process — which is no problem for the non-linear pre- and post-literate cultures around the rest of the world, but which presents a significant challenge to the linear-minded, production-oriented norteamericanos.

Process takes on a different meaning in North American sport, as savvy sport managers have decided that too much wastage occurs on the shop floor. Thus, efficiencies are sought in order to capture byproducts of the uncertainty-of-outcome process and turn them into saleable products of their own. These byproducts are the images and information that are produced by the athletes during each game, and which then move upstream for the manufacture of highlight videos, fantasy leagues, and videogames.

Thus, the "double jointed" nature of professional sport today: two different firms (the competing franchises) co-operate to jointly produce an uncertainty-of-outcome, and in doing so, execute a joint production model in which two different outputs (the uncertain outcome and the digital information stream) result from the one process.

Of course, other production technologies such as television cameras and broadband networks are required to capture the digital information output, move it upstream, and convert it into something saleable. In this light, professional sport resembles many other industrial-age manufacturing processes. The difference, however, is this: in the material age of industrial manufacturing, an input may only be used once, but in the semiurgic age of post-industrialism, the digital information stream may be used over and over, copied and pasted, and generally recombined ad infinitum into various forms to suit the myriad "needs" of the consumer.

Wanted to sample this classic for sportsBabel:

Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts… A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights receding… (Neuromancer, 1984).

The World Championship of Golden Tee is held in Orlando:

Steve estimated he's made more than a quarter of a million dollars playing the game over the course of his Golden Tee career. Every year, through the Incredible Technologies website (which keeps stats for all its registered players), Steve prints out his stats and earnings and then sends that print-out to the IRS. That way, he's able to declare the money he puts into Golden Tee as a tax write-off.

And Steve doesn't let injuries hinder his game. Many players suffer cuts on their hands from how violently they swing forward on the game console's trackball to get power on their shots. Players have even broken hands playing Golden Tee.

"I'm usually the one bleeding," Steve said. "But I just say, 'Patch me up so I can keep playing!' I even learned to play left-handed. Nothing's gonna stop me. I'll take the pain, if that's what it takes to win."

EA Sports strikes a deal with Nike and other shoe manufacturers to have the authentic shoes worn by players appear on their virtual counterparts:

Not only does the game boast a store, where gamers can use points they rack up to purchase a host of items including shoes the Nike Shox Supremacy, the Air Max and, of course the most expensive, the first Air Jordan, but Nike and EA plan to release 50 cheat codes throughout the year to allow players to unlock old retro favorites or shoes that are hitting the market.

"When making the games, we not only look at the rulebook to make sure we have everything right, but seek to touch on relevant cultural hot points," Chin said. "And shoes definitely fall into that category."

So far, three codes have been released — for the Nike Shox BB4's (the shoe Carter was wearing when he dunked over poor Frederick Weis in the 2000 Olympics), the famous Air Jordan III's (the first Jordan's featuring the now very recognizable Jumpman logo) and the LeBron James' Air Zoom Generations, which became unlockable on the night James plays his first game on Oct. 29.

EA Games releases the Quidditch World Cup, featuring the fantasy Harry Potter and friends with real-life nationalism:

Starting with any one of the four Hogwarts house teams — including Harry Potter's Gryffindor — players learn Quidditch basics with five original challenges and the Hogwarts House Cup competition. Once completed, players can enter the Quidditch World Cup, choosing from a range of international teams including the USA, England, France, Germany, the Nordic Team, Japan, Spain, Australia, and Bulgaria - featuring Viktor Krum. Each national team sports its own Quidditch gear, has a unique stadium environment, and different strengths that lend depth and strategy, especially when two gamers face off in two-player competition for the first time ever in a Harry Potter video game.

smithers:

[Aside] I am posting from the Ontario Science Centre, just because I can.

(Note: the Sports section sucked…)

[Exit]

[T]his stage of serial reproduction (that of the industrial mechanism, of the factory belt, of expanded reproduction) is ephemeral. As soon as dead work wins out over living work — that is, as soon as the era of primitive accumulation is over — serial production yields to generation by means of models. And here it is a question of a reversal of origin and finality, for all the forms change once they are not so much mechanically reproduced but even conceived from the point-of-view of their very reproductibility, diffracted from a generating nucleus we call the model. (Baudrillard, Simulations, p.100).

Practically and historically, this signified the substitution of social control by the end (and by a more or less dialectical providence which surveys the accomplishment of this end) for social control by anticipation, simulation and programming, and indeterminate mutation directed by the code. Instead of a process which is finalized according to its ideal development, we generalize from a model. Instead of a right to a prophecy, we have the right of registration. There is no really radical difference between the two, only the schemes of control have become fantastically perfected. From a capitalist-productivist society to a neo-capitalist cybernetic order that aims now at total control. This is the mutation for which the biological theorization of the code prepares the ground. There is nothing of an accident in this mutation. It is the end of a history in which, successively, God, Man, Progress, and History itself die to profit the code, in which transcendence dies to profit immanence, the latter corresponding to a much more advanced phase in the vertiginous manipulation of social rapports (Baudrillard, Simulations, p.111).

1. Dependent on chance, luck, or an uncertain outcome.
2. Of or characterized by gambling.
3. also a·le·a·to·ric Music. Using or consisting of sounds to be chosen by the performer or left to chance; indeterminate.

[Latin letrius, from letor, gambler, from lea, game of chance, die.]

Source: The American Heritage? Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition

Copyright - 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.

Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

The more you create village conditions, the more discontinuity and division and diversity. The global village absolutely insures maximal disagreement on all points. … I don't approve of the global village. I say we live in it.

There is no more 'past' under electric culture: every 'past' is now. And there is no future: it is already here.

One thing about which fish know exactly nothing is water, since they have no anti-environment which would enable them to perceive the element they live in.

The sportocratic institutions will face unprecedented internecine strife as they wrestle with the fundamental question of whether or not sport represents Truth.

David Stern, potentate of the NBA and its far-reaching empire, I urge you to understand the importance of Global Village Basketball in creating a more peaceful planet!

Humanity has known technology since fire; the crux of cyborgism, then, is the vector of an increasing tendency to incorporate these technologies into our bodies.

Kindly and avuncular, fire-breathing and fist-swinging, Don Zimmer will not be back on the bench next year with the Yankees.

Most American sports fans feel deracinated when watching a high-quality soccer game, with its paucity of scoring and — gasp! — propensity for draws.

Is an Anti-Olympics better suited for building amity between the people of the world?

Professional sport offers a microcosm of broader society: in fact, we are all cyborgs.

Brand busts out monster
game to earn bucks back; alas
Sterling's bank broken

The cyborg athlete must never become impassible, for pain is that which allows us to retain a modicum of humanity.

The sports superstar who is contumacious with the media perhaps senses his cyborgian role as information-factory, and yearns simply to be left alone as an artist.

Alas, Steinbrenner?s largesse went unrewarded this fall, so it is back to the vaults for 2004.

Humankind once harnessed cataracts of water to power turbines and produce electricity; it won?t be long before humans themselves step in to fill that role.

Disconcerting: when my inner voices periodically speak up, sotto voce, to suggest that the sportsBabel project is heading in the wrong direction.

Towards the end of a marathon, one views only wraiths, bodily annihilated, the only feature belying the apparition a drumbeat cadence of footsteps toward the finish line.

After the race, these same runners become vapid and zombie-like as they attempt to reconcile the meaning of their accomplishment.

• I disagree with Rebecca Lock: in an uncertain athletic situation during a sporting contest, an ideal docile body WILL HAVE NO IDEA WHAT TO DO!! And after coaching basketball for the highly-disciplined Acadia basketball team, I have ethnographic "evidence" to support this statement.

• Upon retirement, golf becomes the new work.
• Will energy-producing cybernetic couplings between human and bike/stairmaster/ergometer become the new form of civic duty?
• Linds and I are here watching the Knicks-Magic game on TV, in which Rogers Sportsnet is relaying the live feed from the Sunshine Network broadcast. It took a few moments for us to realize why the game was so boring (beyond the fact that it was NY vs. Orlando!): there was temporarily no live play-by-play audio feed. Linds summarized this nicely: "This seems old-school … the audio really does make the game."

In the era of high-quality sports simulations, look for extinct sports such as the Aztecan tlachtli to be brought back to life, as if in a Jurassic Park of sports culture.

Beware revisionist history, however, as well as the episode featuring "The first white to play in the Aztecan Professional Tlachtli League!"

They'll have to get rid of that name, though: "tlachtli" just doesn't roll off the tongue, and you know what that will mean for the Google-Nielsen "Goggle" ratings.

Not to worry — the image-makers can take care of small details like that.

More to the point of this weblog, these simulations allow us to live as if simultaneously in all time. While in the present, we recall the past, in order to simulate potential futures. This has serious consequences for how we live as chameleontological beings.

On CBS's NFL pregame show The NFL Today:

Boomer Esiaison discusses the recent San Diego fires, which have caused the Chargers to fly into Chicago three days early and stay in a Holiday Inn.

Deion Sanders seems incredulous: "What, Boomer? An NFL team in a Holiday Inn? That just doesn't seem right. Are you sure?"

(nervous tittering ensues from the panel)

Jim Nantz rejoins, as if on cue: "Never underestimate the importance of a good night's sleep."

*whew … nice save Jim*

Popular culture, particularly in such films as Terminator and RoboCop, normally visions the cyborg as a fusion of human flesh and lightweight steel composite, which is useful as a dramatic device, but limited in terms of the reality of the cyborg body.

The reality of the cyborg body is that it emerges during the post-industrial shift from a metallurgic society to a semiurgic society. In other words, the cyborg lives in a society of information, of pattern, of code.

Thus, the "machine" half of the cyborg is also likely to be one of code: recombinant DNA sequences, organic chemistry chains, electrical positives and negatives, digital zeroes and ones, disciplinary technologies, and collective consciousness will all be leveraged in the realization of a cyborg body. This is not to suggest that the metallurgic will cease to be part of such a body, but rather that it will assume a subservient or relegated role.

Another important consideration is that (at this time) the "machine" half of the cyborg body is not fixed. We slip on and off our protective equipment, we start and stop taking synthetic drugs, we jack into and out of the matrix. Thus, above all, the cyborg is a discursive formation, a way of describing the tension between humans and their technologies — and lest we forget, technologies have pervaded our lives since the advent of fire.

Cyborgism, then, may best be described as an increasing tendency to integrate with our technologies at the very level of the human body. It is a vector that suggests a new way of understanding the human being.

Pairs figure skating, while normally viewed as a more artistic form of sport, is in fact quite scientific in its choreography. Almost every element may be thought of as an oscillation, or of existing in an acoustic space: either the partners perform the move in complete harmonic unison, thus strengthening the signal, or in complete opposition, thus cancelling out the wave. Any element that does not fit this description usually involves some combination of speed, leaping ability, or strength — and once again we see the Latin expression of scientific sport: citius, altius, fortius, copiosus.

(BTW, is figure skating simply cheerleading with a dramatic baroque aesthetic laid over top?)

Revisiting the idea of the videogamer as puppeteer:

What is interesting is that instead of strings controlling the puppet, there is a stream of digital bits travelling back-and-forth down the controller cord (and perhaps soon wirelessly?) to control the virtual character. Instead of the puppeteer using a complex series of arm, elbow and wrist movements to position the puppet, the code or combination of movements required to position the virtual character is now enacted by one's fingers and thumbs — one's digits.

So the controller's movements have transformed from originating in the core trunk muscles, down the limbs, to the digits. Perhaps in the future EEG signals will prevent any muscular movement from being necessary at all.

TSN's on-air male talent: the same dark suit, the same dark hair, the same deep voice, the same rigidity of shoulders, face and lips; in other words, a pack of sportocratic Agent Smiths looking to reprogram your code.

smithers:

[Aside] I just returned from my first ever visit to the North American Society for Sport Sociology conference, which ran this past weekend in Montreal. The conference theme was Sport and Human Rights, which tied in nicely to my presentation "The Sportocratic Apparatus and the Making of Cyborg Athletes".

The environment was awesome, and I met a bunch of cool people. Of course, Montreal didn't disappoint either — a very stylish little city.

Many thanks to Dewq, Cantelon, Rod, Bruce and the rest of the U of A contingent for welcoming me in and showing me the ropes a little.

[Exit]