Picture this:
You're at a football game.
The lights are blaring overhead, the crowd is chanting and cheering around you. The ball is in play, soaring through the air in a perfect spiral. The wide receiver is in position, ready to seize the ball and run. You watch with bated breath.
As the leather of the ball meets the tips of the player's outstretched fingers, the man in front of you jumps up, blocking the game from view. The crowd goes wild but you're unable to see why. The solution? Huge screen LCDs, slow motion instant replay and descriptive play-by-play screaming from speakers overhead.
This is clearly a logical response to a nagging problem. Or is it?
Brent Cottle, PhD and instructor of Pop Culture, Film and Literature at Lethbridge College, is doing his best to discover the effects of technological interference on the culture of football, particularly in the NFL. His theory is that the broadcast representation of the game disassociates fans from its inherent and somewhat increasing levels of violence.
"I'm looking at the ways football is represented at games," he says, "as well as how it is represented in various other media. In the [pop culture] classes I teach, there's a lot of stuff about music, TV and movies, but there's not much about sports. It seemed strange to me because sports is such a huge part of contemporary culture."
His research included packing up and heading to various high-profile games, including a game at the Dallas Cowboys stadium, where a 9,000 square-foot double-sided screen gives sports fans an unblocked and highly detailed view of the game from wherever they are seated. With his locker room pass in hand, Cottle visited the athletes afterward, gaining insight into their perception of how technological advances have affected the game itself as well as the fans' interpretation of the images.
"They don't think fans understand how physical the game is, in part because they see so much of it on screens," he explains. "Fans react to the screen; they develop an intimacy with it. When watching it that way, you take it as reality but when you see it live there's a lot more going on in the game than you understand. You don't see it all because you pay so much attention to the screen."
Despite the high-definition quality of the images being presented onscreen, Cottle believes they may not be the most accurate representations of the violence endured by the athletes; he argues that the images are viewed more as entertainment than reality.
"I think the media image itself is detailed and violent," he explains of the distortion between the image and the actual game, "but it still remains a screen image. People see it as being violent, but they don't understand fully what the violence is."
Cottle has taken his theory international, presenting at the Image Conference at UCLA in December of 2010 and, most recently, at the London Film and Media Conference in July.
"In London, England, I presented on slow motion replay and how that affects people's perception of the game," he says. "It's a unique situation, because coaches can actually use the replays to challenge calls. It's becoming even more predominant than the game itself. After every play, everyone is waiting for the replay, like it's programmed into us."
As for his research, Cottle says his ultimate goal is to have it published while continuing to examine the theory in depth. "I want to continue to develop the dialogue about media and how it affects our understanding of confrontations like this," he says. "I would like people to understand that it changes how we perceive the world. That media representation divorces us from physical reality is an interesting concept and sports is a good arena to view that in."
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