i haven’t finished it yet so i can’t vouch for the whole thing but i feel like you might find the book Sports, Public Broadcasting, and Cultural Citizenship interesting ^^
woah it's HEFTY (archived) thank you for thinking of me clay!! <3 sniffing at the introduction WAH heyyy NHL mentioned!!!
Of course, popular understandings of access to live telecasts of sport on public broadcasters as a right of cultural citizenship can be complicated and, as we shall see below, even some of the most vociferous proponents of public service television contested the presence of ‘mass’ sport on public networks that were often regarded as the preserve of intellectual, ‘high’ dramatic, and other forms of elite minority programming. Furthermore, the sport-television relationship was, from its earliest days, a predominantly masculine experience, and public broadcasters supplied an overwhelming amount of male sport that was consumed by a mostly male audience with greater levels of disposable income and influence in family households.
In Canada, for example, former Olympian Bruce Kidd (1996) has rightly argued that the partnership between the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and the National Hockey League (NHL) distorted the development of Canadian sport and culture along two key lines. First, the sheer quantity of airtime dedicated to NHL hockey on the public broadcaster reinforced the “symbolic annihilation” of women’s sport with regard to mainstream media with “public authority” (Kidd 1996, p. 259), a trend that continues to this day as the public broadcaster strives to capture a primarily male, national audience for advertisers. For Kidd, once advertisers discovered the “remarkable ability of sports broadcasts to assemble affluent male consumers for their sponsors’ appeals” (1996, p. 260), the new broadcasting terrain was quickly structured to ensure that women’s sport was heavily underrepresented.
Second, telecasts of the most popular men’s sports on public networks habitually celebrated “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell 2005) and, in the early days of professional sport, encouraged the repressive labor conditions faced by many athletes. Clearly, then, any argument that supports access to live telecasts of sport as a right of cultural citizenship needs to be held up to critical scrutiny.
paragraph broken up for ease of viewing^ will dig through this on my next walkies... ooouhh...
Published 2016 via The MIT Press - Rogue Archives: Digital Cultural Memory and Media Fandom by Abigail De Kosnik
An examination of how nonprofessional archivists, especially media fans, practice cultural preservation on the Internet and how “digital cultural memory” differs radically from print-era archiving.
Book I'm cracking open some time this off-season. Referenced a chapter for an essay a million years ago, always planned to read the whole thing but never got to it. Seems relevant in light of my current fixation on hockey + sports + fannish archival practices <3 the rest of the blurb + an excerpt of the intro under the cut.
The task of archiving was once entrusted only to museums, libraries, and other institutions that acted as repositories of culture in material form. But with the rise of digital networked media, a multitude of self-designated archivists—fans, pirates, hackers—have become practitioners of cultural preservation on the Internet. These nonprofessional archivists have democratized cultural memory, building freely accessible online archives of whatever content they consider suitable for digital preservation. In Rogue Archives, Abigail De Kosnik examines the practice of archiving in the transition from print to digital media, looking in particular at Internet fan fiction archives.
De Kosnik explains that media users today regard all of mass culture as an archive, from which they can redeploy content for their own creations. Hence, “remix culture” and fan fiction are core genres of digital cultural production. De Kosnik explores, among other things, the anticanonical archiving styles of Internet preservationists; the volunteer labor of online archiving; how fan archives serve women and queer users as cultural resources; archivists' efforts to attract racially and sexually diverse content; and how digital archives adhere to the logics of performance more than the logics of print. She also considers the similarities and differences among free culture, free software, and fan communities, and uses digital humanities tools to quantify and visualize the size, user base, and rate of growth of several online fan archives.
Memory Escapes the State
Memory has gone rogue. What I mean by this, first of all, is that memory has fallen into the hands of rogues.
From the late nineteenth through the late twentieth century, memory — not private, individual memory, but public, collective memory — was the domain of the state. Writes Tony Bennett in The Birth of the Museum, "Museums, galleries, and, more intermittently, exhibitions played a pivotal role in the formation of the modern state and are fundamental to its conception as, among other things, a set of educative and civilizing agencies." Bennett points out that "all developed nation-states" have consistently prioritized funding for their memory institutions, and have benefited from these institutions serving as "mechanisms for the permanent display of power," and as "influential cultural technologies" that testify to the states' "ability to command, order, and control objects and bodies, living or dead" (Bennett 1995, 66). Achille Mbembe argues that "the term 'archives" is first of all understood as referring to "a public institution, which is one of the organs of a constituted state. ... There is no state without archives" (Mbembe 2002, 19, 23).¹
But when digital networked media began displacing earlier forms of transmission (television, radio, cinema, print) as what Philip Auslander calls "the cultural dominant" (Auslander 2008, 23) in regions with widespread Internet access, the ties binding public memory to the state began to loosen, and memory started to forge links with many other masters: people who never underwent training in library and information sciences (LIS) but designated themselves "archivists" anyway, built freely accessible online archives, and began uploading (or assisting users with uploading) whatever content they deemed suitable for digital preservation Digital archiving, while of increasing interest to traditional memory institutions, has been most enthusiastically embraced by nonprofessionals — by amateurs, fans, hackers, pirates, and volunteers — in other words, by "rogue" memory workers. Digital archives of cultural content, not associated with any physical museum, library, or archive, populate the Internet, to the point that many people refer to the Internet as a giant archive. (For example, Lev Manovich states in The Language of New Media, "The Internet ... can be thought of as one huge distributed media database" [Manovich 2001, 55].)
Rogue archivists explore the potential of digital technologies to democratize cultural memory. With digital tools and networks, they construct repositories that are accessible by all Internet users, and can choose to preserve either vast quantities of information (they do not have to choose to save some types of content and discard other types because of physical space restrictions) or highly specific materials (such as the documents of subcultures or minority groups) that have been consistently excluded or ignored by traditional memory institutions. In Rogues, Jacques Derrida relates the "roué”or "rogue,” the figure of licentiousness and debauchery in French culture since the eighteenth century, to democracy: "Democracy, the passage to democracy, democratization, will have always been associated with license, with taking too many liberties, with the dissoluteness of the libertine, with liberalism, indeed perversion and delinquency, with malfeasance, with failing to live according to the law, with the notion that 'everything is allowed,' that 'anything goes'" (Derrida 2005, 21). In other words, the process of ending monarchy and inaugurating democracy in France depended on rogues willing to "take liberties" with the very notion of liberty and make themselves over from king's subjects into republican citizens. Similarly, since the late-1980s advent of what we might call the public Internet (that is, the time when the Internet ceased to be a network usable only by government, university, and research lab employees, and became a network with which millions of people engaged on a daily basis)², rogue archivists have acted on the assumption that "anything goes" on the network, taking the initiative to design, found, and run their own cultural memory institutions without waiting for traditional institutions to set any precedents for online archiving, and achieving a degree of democratic inclusion and access for which brick-and-mortar archives never even aimed. What I call rogue archives are defined by: constant (24/7) availability; zero barriers to entry for all who can connect to the Internet; content that can be streamed or downloaded in full, with no required payment, and no regard for copyright restrictions (some rogue archivists digitize only what is already in the public domain); and content that has never been, and would likely never be, contained in a traditional memory institution.
One digital archivist interviewed by my research team, who uses the pseudonym "jinjurly" and runs what is called the Audiofic Archive, sums up the rogue's attitude toward traditional ideas about the institutional qualifications required for archival work:
[I used to say] "I've got an archive, but I'm not an archivist." I don't have an archivist degree. But what does that mean? Okay, when I was cooking in restaurants, I was writing menus and composing recipes and running a line and hiring and firing and running a kitchen, but I wasn't a chef, because I don't have a chef education or whatever. But again, what does that mean? I really, honestly think that — well, okay, everything takes practice—but anyone can do these things. (jinjurly 2012)
jinjurly's words may have been scandalous in an earlier era, but as digital culture develops, her idea that "anyone can do these things" — meaning that anyone can build a digital archive if she cultivates the necessary technical skills, dedicates sufficient time and resources, and commits to serving a public over a long time period of time through an enduring online resource — is becoming more and more common. Indeed, the "scandal" caused by rogue archivists consists precisely of their transforming "archives" and "archiving" from terms that signify exclusivity into terms that signify commonness, so that instead of locked rooms, the word "archives" connotes websites that operate as information commons, and instead of the concealed workings of a rarefied circle of experts, "archiving" refers to acts of database design and maintenance that "anyone can do," that are commonplace. And scandals such as these, caused by roués, Derrida claims, can beget serious social and cultural transformations.
Derrida emphasizes rogues' abilities to bring about change, even on the scale of sweeping, radical revolutions. The rogues of digital archiving have effectuated cultural memory's escape from the state; memory will never again be wholly, or even mostly, under the control of the state or state-approved capitalists. Having fallen under the sway of rogues, cultural memory has become more democratic. But this is not the only way that memory is different in the digital era than it was before.
hi! it's odense :) speaking variously of hockey and labor, I was trawling jstor lately and found a few that made me think of you! Strategic Behaviours in a Labour Market with Mobility-Restricting Contractual Provisions: Evidence from the National Hockey League at jstor org/stable/resrep58092 + Organising challenges in the era of financialisation: The case of videogame workers at jstor stable/10.13169/workorgalaboglob.15.2.0007 + Salary disclosure and individual effort: Evidence from the National Hockey League on sciencedirect at doi /10.1016/j.jebo.2022.08.014 (disclaimer I haven't read them through, just wanted to pass along)
I’VE BEEN HOARDING THIS EVER SINCE IT POPPED UP IN MY INBOX BACKLOG (ODENSE NO LONGER SHADOWBANNED LETS GO???) scuttling to my wife jstor this evening <3 thank you!!
hey fun fact: there’s a book on the 1986 mets titled ‘the bad guys won!’. you know. typical evil baseball (i mean, i forgive them)
It was 1986, and the New York Mets won 108 regular-season games and the World Series, capturing the hearts (and other assorted body parts) of fans everywhere. But their greatness on the field was nearly eclipsed by how bad they were off it. Led by the indomitable Keith Hernandez and the young dynamic duo of Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry, along with the gallant Scum Bunch, the Amazin’s left a wide trail of wreckage in their wake—hotel rooms, charter planes, a bar in Houston, and most famously Bill Buckner and the hated Boston Red Sox.
With an unforgettable cast of characters—including Doc, Straw, the Kid, Nails, Mex, and manager Davey Johnson—this “affectionate but critical look at this exciting season” (Publishers Weekly) celebrates the last of baseball’s arrogant, insane, rock-and-roll-and-party-all-night teams, exploring what could have been, what should have been, and what never was.
^incredible blurb. need to pick it up i LOVE this sorta thing!!
