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THE SOCIOLOGY
OF SPORTS-TALK
RADIO
Robert L. Kerr
The Sociology of Sports-Talk Radio
Robert L. Kerr
The Sociology
of Sports-Talk Radio
Robert L. Kerr
The University of Oklahoma
Norman
OK, USA
v
Contents
Index 97
vii
CHAPTER 1
Abstract The opening chapter introduces this study of the social struc-
tures and processes that make sports-talk radio today such a vibrant societal
milieu and seeks to identify the essential sociological dynamics that make all
that endless talking so vital to so many. Through a qualitatively descriptive
analytic focus on the sociological dynamics of the talk of sports-talk radio, a
remarkable world where so very many come together to interact frequently,
insistently, colorfully, emotionally, and quite often with stunning ferocity in
processes by which human communicators construct meaning.
processes that make sports-talk radio today such a vibrant societal milieu
and seeking to identify the essential sociological dynamics that make all
that endless talking so vital to so many. It will analyze in narrative detail
just what it is that humans do in that communicative milieu that they
consider so deeply important—and make no mistake, the intensity of the
interactions among participants demonstrates with consistency and clar-
ity what a place of almost unequaled significance it represents in their
understanding of social life.
The study will so endeavor through a qualitatively descriptive analytic
focus on the sociological dynamics of the talk of sports-talk radio itself—
or in more formally methodological language, interrogating for social
significance this profusion of mediated representations of sport to con-
sider how they contribute to recurring themes and dominant frames and
encourage those involved to develop thematically consonant understand-
ings. In that remarkable world where so very many today come together
to interact frequently, insistently, colorfully, emotionally, and quite often
with stunning ferocity, the analysis of this study will place in sociological
context these significant bodies of media discourse and the role they play
in processes by which human communicators construct meaning.
The social process is “the dynamic component of sport in society,”
wrote sociologist Wilbert Marcellus Leonard in his classic A Sociological
Perspective of Sport, emphasizing the critical elements of that activity as
“the repetitive and reoccurring interactional patterns characterizing indi-
vidual and group transactions.” Sports-talk radio offers a remarkably rich
source for considering such interactional patterns. It has been found,
for example, to contrast with political talk radio in that it is “more tol-
erant of diverse perspectives,” as cultural studies scholar David Nylund
has discussed. The media venues where sports discourse flourishes in
many ways provide “a socially sanctioned gossip sheet,” as media-studies
scholar Lawrence A. Wenner has characterized it in discussing the quali-
ties of sport communication scholarship in his volume Media, Sports, and
Society, where “the legitimized gossip… is about sporting events rather
than social events, but it is socializing nonetheless.”
More broadly, this study contributes to greater understanding of what
sociologist David Rowe formulated as “the media sports cultural com-
plex,” which he said, “signifies both the primacy of the sports media and
the great cultural formation of which it is part.” That complex is driven
in significant part, as Wenner wrote in MediaSport (a title referencing
his concept of the “new genetic strain” produced via “cultural fusing of
1 INTRODUCTION: WHY THE SOCIOLOGY OF SPORTS-TALK … 5
the nature of reality in any given world. That relevant consistency can be
identified in other key characteristics critical to understanding postmod-
ernist theory.
First, postmodernism “describes the emergence of a society in which
the mass media and popular culture are the most important and power-
ful institutions, and control and shape all other types of social relation-
ships,” as Strinati has emphasized. “Popular cultural signs and media
images increasingly dominate our sense of reality, and the way we define
ourselves and the world around us.” Second, as social theorist Geneviève
Rail focused upon in Sport and Postmodern Times, a collection of essays
she edited on the subject, crucial to postmodernist thought is “the idea
that the world is fragmented into many isolated worlds; it is a collage, a
pastiche of elements randomly grouped in a plurality of local, autono-
mous discourses that cannot be unified by any grand theory,” along with
a preoccupation with “the problem of meaning… as fundamentally slip-
pery and elusive.” Finally, the assertion that mediated sport may derive
its sociological significance more than anything else from serving as a
powerful source of narratives draws upon society’s great need for narra-
tives—in all sorts of matters, not just sport.
Functionally, narratives hardly exist only as stories, amusements, or
diversions. In plain language, narratives make things happen—because
human beings much more often than they realize act upon narratives
that explain what they believe to be transpiring—rather than only on
empirical knowledge of what may actually be happening. Peter Kramer,
a professor of clinical psychiatry, has written convincingly for example of
the role that narratives play in the practice of medicine. Ideally, he has
declared, doctors will “consider data, accompanying narrative, plausi-
bility and, yes, clinical anecdote in their decision making,” because “we
need storytelling, to set us in the clinical moment, remind us of the vari-
ety of human experience and enrich our judgment.” Or consider how
Robert Shiller, the Nobel Prize winning economist, has written of the
way narratives can move markets more dramatically than actual economic
developments—so much so that he states flatly: “Fundamentally, stock
markets are driven by popular narratives, which don’t need basis in solid
fact,” and “these narratives can affect people’s spending behavior, too, in
turn affecting corporate profit margins, and so on. Sometimes such feed-
back loops continue for years.”
So it is actually far from any wacky egghead notion to recognize
the way that commercial sport represents–more than anything else–a
1 INTRODUCTION: WHY THE SOCIOLOGY OF SPORTS-TALK … 11
cease. Before, during and after the games, such narratives seek to impose
meaning upon what will happen, what is happening, what has happened.
And the appetite for such narratives among consumers and producers of
every stripe seems to have no limit.