M. Stauff

Introduction The Transparency Issue

Besides giving an overview on the individual contributions, this introduction to the special issue on transparency delineates a conceptual context for a critical analysis of the contemporary discourse on transparency and the media mechanisms related to it. It focuses on three ambivalences inherent to transparency: (a) The Enlightenment and modernity promise transparency and at the same time produce a structural complexity undermining all simple endeavors to make things visible. (b) Transparency, therefore, is never given but is based on artificial representational and mediatic strategies; the processes of mediation, however, applied to produce and display transparency, attract suspicion for being selective and manipulative. (c) Transparency is often equated with the possibility of a critical public while the practice of critique (according to scholars as different as Latour, Serres, Ranciere, and Boltanski) has become toothless in its redundant claim to disclose what other people do not see. Instead of just ridiculing the notion of transparency, we argue in conclusion that any call for transparency should always be accompanied with a careful examination and possible contention of why to disclose this (and not something else) and why with these tools (and not others).Besides giving an overview on the individual contributions, this introduction to the special issue on transparency delineates a conceptual context for a critical analysis of the contemporary discourse on transparency and the media mechanisms related to it. It focuses on three ambivalences inherent to transparency: (a) The Enlightenment and modernity promise transparency and at the same time produce a structural complexity undermining all simple endeavors to make things visible. (b) Transparency, therefore, is never given but is based on artificial representational and mediatic strategies; the processes of mediation, however, applied to produce and display transparency, attract suspicion for being selective and manipulative. (c) Transparency is often equated with the possibility of a critical public while the practice of critique (according to scholars as different as Latour, Serres, Rancière, and Boltanski) has become toothless in its redundant claim to disclose what other people do not see. Instead of just ridiculing the notion of transparency, we argue in conclusion that any call for transparency should always be accompanied with a careful examination and possible contention of why to disclose this (and not something else) and why with these tools (and not others).

The Assertive Image: Referentiality and Reflexivity in Sports Photography

»Das nachdruckliche Bild: Referentialitat und Reflexivitat in der Sportfotografie«. Contrary to other social practices, sports organize competitions on a publicly visible stage, where they are supposed to have an immediately recognizable and definite result. Embedded into this results-oriented and emphatically visual culture of sports, individual images often turn into what can be called assertive images, which are explicitly addressed as images and commented upon in order to admire performances and understand them. This article will use photographs from the time before television started to be the dominant medium – from the 1930s to 1960s – to outline four recurrent procedures which contribute to such assertiveness. The approach, which is more systematic than historical, aims at developing key questions, terms, and concepts for more detailed case studies. The more general claim is that media have not only been a means to represent sports, but sport has also functioned as a stage to display the qualities of media.

Technical Innovation, Social Participation, Societal Self-Reflection: Televised Sport in (West) German Society

The history of German television has been closely connected with sports since its very beginning. Following the official start of test services on 22 March 1935, the broadcasting of the 1936 Berlin Olympic games represents the first high point in the history of the young medium. With this first ‘media event’, sports coverage had already taken up the key position that it has occupied ever since in the history of television. In Germany today, just as then, technical innovations are symbolically staged and popularized mainly in the context of sports events — whether they be new image technologies like slow motion replay or ‘virtual replay’, or broadcast and recording technologies such as cable and satellite TV after 1984, the introduction of digital pay TV from 1996, or more recently the introduction of DVD and PVR. It is therefore no exaggeration to call sport a central element in the technical, economic and programming strategies of the television industry, and also in the formulation of state policy regarding the media.’ Looking at the history of televised sport shows that the dovetailing of sport, technology and society that we know today has been a constant feature since the advent of the medium.