Sports play a giant role in contemporary society worldwide. But few of us pause to think about the larger questions of money, politics, race, sex, culture, and commercialization that surround sports everywhere. This course draws on the tools of anthropology, sociology, history, and other disciplines to give you new perspectives on the games we watch and play. It's the new and improved version of Professor Orin Starn's original "Sports and Society" for Coursera, which drew more than 40,000 students. We will focus on both popular sports like soccer (or “football,” as anyone outside America calls it), basketball, and baseball, and also lesser-known ones like mountain-climbing and fishing. You will never watch or think about sports in the same way again.
The Phenomenon of the Fan, Part 1
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From the course by Duke University
Sports and Society
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From the lesson
Why Do We Care So Much about Sports?
Meet the Instructors
Orin StarnProfessor
Cultural Anthropology
[MUSIC]
This time I wanna think with you about the phenomenon of the fan.
Namely why it is that so many hundreds of millions of us probably billions,
at this point, around the world spend so much time watching sports on tv, streaming
sports on the internet, going to games, following our favorite teams and players.
And to begin to think about this question
I wanna introduce the concept of what can be called the great transformation.
The great transformation is something that happens in the nature and
the relationship of sports and spectatorship.
Over the last century.
A hundred years ago, sports were already a big deal.
But the majority of people spent the majority of their time
playing sports not watching sports and being fans.
Remember this is an age of before television, way before television.
When the radio is just beginning.
When really only the big mass media is newspapers and
people really don't have the option to watch games on any form of media.
They can go to the stadium, but that's their only option for being a fan.
And so, proportion wise sports and
the time that's getting spent on them really is revolving more around playing,
participating then sitting on the couch and staring at the television.
Now over the last century this relationship has flipped and
we still spend tons of time around the world playing sports but
we spend even more time watching them now.
I am always struck by students here at Duke, and whom many are very athletic and
play intramural on varsity sports.
A lot of them say, at least the ones who aren't on varsity teams, say well,
yeah I play a lot of sports, but I spend even more time like following scores and
gonna games and doing the whole fantasy fan thing on the internet.
So this is the great transformation, it's the growth of spectatorship and
fandom into this gigantic global phenomenon.
Lewis Mumford, who is this interesting social critic in the early 20th Century
already wrote in 1934 that following sports,
being sports had become what he called a duty of the machine age.
This thing almost that we love,
but especially men that we feel obligated to do.
A really big part of our lives.
Now, the midwife of this so called great transformation,
the growth of sports fandom into a gigantic phenomenon is very
obviously technology and in particular communications technology.
As radio develops and then, especially, television in the 1960s and
70s, followed in the 80s and the 90s up to the present by the Internet.
These communications technologies bring sports to every corner of the world and
make it possible to engage in our passion addiction for sports at any time of day.
So you can do sports now anywhere, any time.
When I go to do research in a little Andean village
in Peru where I've been going for 30 years, I can now watch over the Internet.
I can stream a New York Yankees or an Oakland A's baseball game if I want.
So you can watch sports anywhere.
You can also now watch sports anytime.
If I can't sleep some night, I wake up at 3:30 AM worrying about this or
that as we sometimes do, I can turn on a game.
I can get a cricket game from India or watch a soccer game that's being
played in Russia or whatever sports 24/7 everywhere around the world.
And this phenomenon of what could be called sports creep,
the massification of sports and their availability.
All around the world at any time is really a relatively recent
invention of the last forty or fifty years.
It takes television first for this to become possible.
But in the early age of television and sports in the 1960s and
the early 1970s, you still didn't have all that big access to watching games.
So I can remember back when I was a little kid in the 1960s and
I was already really into sports that the only thing that you could watch on TV was,
that I remember anyway.
Was the Saturday game of the week.
I think it was on NBC.
It was a baseball game.
We still had a black and white tv in those days of the dinosaur, and that was it.
If you wanted to watch baseball, you watched it on Saturday.
And they had football games, I believe, NFL games on Sunday and
maybe a basketball game on Sunday.
It was only on the weekends and it was only once a week.
And it was the same way when I was a kid in the early 1970s in Italy.
There if you wanted to watch sports during the week forget about it.
The only time that you could watch sports was on Sunday afternoon,
because that's when the Italian City League soccer games were happening.
So all of this begins to change in 1970.
You can fix it at a particular date.
That's when Monday Night Football is invented in the United States.
And these TV producers have what was then a kinda wild original idea.
Hey, what would happen if we showed a football game during the week and
in Prime Time in the evening, not in the middle of the day?
Wouldn't that be a radical idea.
Well, they did it and Monday Night Football took off.
There was a huge appetite for that.
And 30, 40 years later you have Thursday Night Football and
you had football on Saturday and you had football on Sunday and
you had football highlights shows and talk shows all through during the week.
So 1970 Monday night football and
then in 1979 ESPN another landmark in the story of the great
transformation of sports creep of the massive occasion of sports.
ESPN as the idea hey, we cannot only show some games during the week,
as Monday night football is pioneering, we can have a 24/7 sports channel so you can
watch something related to sports every day of the week at any time of the day.
So, that's where we have gotten to now, and
it's only accelerated thru the internet, sports anytime, anywhere.
And the question then becomes, okay, communications technology
has enabled the blowing up the gigantification of sports fandom.
But why sports?
Why is it that so many of us seem to care so
much about sports to spend so much of our time watching sports?
Now I probably spend at least three or four hours of week and
at times in my life I would spend more than that watching sports on TV.
Why sports?
After all, in this entertainment saturated society, we could be watching
any other kinda junky stuff or whatever drama you would be streaming,
Netflix movies or many of us are doing that.
There's a zillion and one different options.
So, why sports?
Why is is that sports seem to have this hold over the imagination of a certain
pretty big sector of the global population.
And that's the question why sports, why sports fandom,
that I wanna turn to in the second part of the lecture.
[MUSIC]
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