Brett Hutchins

Power games: environmental protest, news media and the internet

Print and electronic news media have played a central role in environmental politics for 30 years: negotiating access, shaping meanings, circulating symbols. Environmentalists have responded with strategies and tactics created for and communicated through the news media. Protest action is one such strategy that has become ‘reflexively conditioned’ to an unprecedented level in its pursuit of media attention (Cottle, 2008: 853). It is for this reason that the internet and the worldwide web have been a tantalising source of hope for activists over the past decade, offering the potential for independent information distribution devoid of the mediating effect of news journalists and the established news media industries. This article investigates and analyses how the recursive relationship between online digital ‘new media’ and print and electronic news media – or ‘old media’ – has unfolded (Jenkins, 2006), which is an important task if the precise dimensions of the power struggle occurring between environmental activists and news media sources are to be understood.

The power of the unseen: environmental conflict, the media and invisibility:

This article critically revisits the operation of ‘mediated visibility’ in the context of environmental conflict. Challenger groups have long gained access to news media and influenced political decision-makers by staging highly visible protest events that draw public attention to environmental threats and destruction. The advent of the world-wide web and digital media tools has since added to the tactical arsenal available to groups wanting to infiltrate and disrupt government and corporate networks of power. In turn, governments and corporations deploy these same tools to maintain their reputation and check opponents who oppose their activities. These developments have, we argue, produced a significant flow-on effect. The function of invisibility – or the coordinated avoidance of media communication, attention and respresentation in order to achieve political and/or social ends – is an under-examined feature of contemporary environmental politics. The case study and evidence presented here are drawn from fieldwork conducted in the Australian island state of Tasmania, and extensive content analysis of news media, social networking platforms and websites.

The Web 2.0 Olympics Athlete Blogging, Social Networking and Policy Contradictions at the 2008 Beijing Games

The Beijing Olympics was the largest sports mega-event in history and represents an opportunity to assess the dynamics of the media sport cultural complex in a post-broadcast age. This article argues that the internet and web are transforming and intensifying the digital mediatization of Olympic sport in terms of the amount and types of content available across multiple platforms. From the perspective of Olympic and sports officials, these developments possess a Janus-faced character, simultaneously offering additional avenues to promote the Olympic brand and experience globally and challenging their capacity to maintain control over Olympic related media in online environments. This situation is the result of long-established broadcast media strategies colliding with the networking capacity of Web 2.0 and the operation and popularity of ‘social software’ such as blogs and Facebook. The evidence presented is drawn from Olympic policy documents, media reports and interviews with sports officials and athletes.

Contradictions in media sport culture: The reinscription of football supporter traditions through online media:

The website MyFootballClub offers a novel experience for football fans. Through the design and operation of a website, it attempts to reinvigorate fan participation in a heavily mediated, multibillion-dollar global industry. Charging a membership fee of £35 (47), MFC purchased a controlling stake in a non-league English football club, with power over management decisions handed to online members. Attracting more than 30,000 members from over 70 nations, this exercise in online ‘football democracy’ is significant for more than its novelty value and the spawning of similar exercises in other countries. MFC offers an important case study in which ‘media space’ is privileged above all others, claiming to resurrect football-based organic community bonds that were supposedly disrupted by media, but doing so within media. MFC demonstrates how media sport synthesizes apparent contradictions, so that members can recreate football-as-folk-culture fantasies through the processes of mediation and commodification that are otherwise blamed for killing ‘the people’s game’.

Cultures of Complaint Online Fan Message Boards and Networked Digital Media Sport Communities

Association football fans in the UK often blame the media for ruining the game as an organic community experience. Certainly, this proposition is supported by the substantial levels of complaint that can be found across thousands of online fan message boards. We argue that these complaints embrace online comment and activism as a continuation of football’s traditional culture of communicative exchange between supporters. Yet, online football fan discussion also presents a contradiction, relying upon the same media networks against which fans rail for commodifying ‘the people’s game’. Using cultivation analysis, the case presented is based upon a study of ‘FreeMyFC’ (FMFC), a website ostensibly started to expose the failures of ‘MyFootballClub’ (MFC), the world’s first attempt to manage a football club through a supporter funded and managed website.

Losing Control of the Ball: The Political Economy of Football and the Media in Australia

This article examines the political economy of one of Australia’s prominent football codes: Rugby League. A Marxist-influenced political economy approach is used to emphasize processes of domination, subordination, and resistance in the production and reproduction of power relations within capitalist sporting relations and structures. Analysis, framed around the concepts of MediaSport and the media sport cultural complex, shows how Rugby League is bound up in both national and global media processes. Key areas under examination include the historical development of the commodification of Rugby League, the growth of the media sport cultural complex, the role of pay television and the control of Rugby League vested in the transnational company News Corporation, and the supporter resistance to corporate media control in the sport.

Sport on the Move The Unfolding Impact of Mobile Communications on the Media Sport Content Economy

The increased popularity of mobile smartphones and tablet computers in developed economies is transforming how and where sports footage, highlights and information are accessed. These developments are contributing to new commercial arrangements in the media sport sector, as well as legal conflicts over sought-after content that is transferable and reproduced across broadcast (pay-for-view and free-to-air television), online (desktop and laptop computers), and mobile platforms (smartphone and tablets). In particular, mobile and wireless communications highlight that the media sport content economy is now “on the move” from technology, commercial, regulatory, and legal perspectives. This article outlines factors that are determining how this economy functions in relation to mobile media, with an emphasis on the complex and sometimes unpredictable relationship between content production, distribution, platforms, and access.

Environmental Conflict and the Media

Has the hype associated with the «revolutionary» potential of the World Wide Web and digital media for environmental activism been muted by the past two decades of lived experience? What are the empirical realities of the prevailing media landscape? Using a range of related disciplinary perspectives, the contributors to this book analyze and explain the complicated relationship between environmental conflict and the media. They shine light on why media are central to historical and contemporary conceptions of power and politics in the context of local, national and global issues and outline the emerging mixture of innovation and reliance on established strategies in environmental campaigns. With cases drawn from different sections of the globe – Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Europe, Latin America, China, Japan, the Pacific Islands, Africa – the book demonstrates how conflicts emanate from and flow across multiple sites, regions and media platforms and examines the role of the media in helping to structure collective discussion, debate and decision-making.

Twitter Follow the Money and Look Beyond Sports

In this Twitter Research Forum essay, Brett Hutchins, a leading researcher on the increasing digitization of sports media, reflects on the use value of Twitter for sports media researchers. Hutchin...In this Twitter Research Forum essay, Brett Hutchins, a leading researcher on the increasing digitization of sports media, reflects on the use value of Twitter for sports media researchers. Hutchins notes two responses for the increase in the number of research articles examining Twitter in the sporting context: (1) acknowledgment of the pivotal role of social networking platforms in contemporary sport industries and (2) a distinct repetitiveness in some research about social media and sport. Noting the ease of data collection concerning Twitter, Hutchins argues that the novelty of Twitter is insufficient justification for analyzing a limited sample of tweets. It is suggested that future research needs to examine Twitter’s status as a commercial enterprise and that commodification needs to be more centrally considered when “scraping” data from Twitter output. Foremost, it is argued that Twitter is best positioned as the subject but not the center of inquiry and matters only because it is a source of insight into the transformation of media and technology markets. The essay closes by encouraging sport media researchers to broaden their agenda by engaging with research on the nonsporting sociocultural contexts and impacts of new digital media.

SELLING PERMISSIBLE VIOLENCE The Commodification of Australian Rugby League 1970-1995

This study uses figurational theory to analyse the articulations between standards of violence control and commodification in Australian rugby league between 1970 and 1995. It is argued that the interdependent social processes of violence regulation and commodification cannot be reduced to a simple cause-and-effect mechanism. Instead, it is imperative to comprehend that myriad social processes interweave to produce fluctuating standards of violence. The major social processes that are addressed include TV, technization, surveillance technologies, judicial structures, negative and positive feedback cycles, marketing and tension-balance.