Talk radio⌠is about as accurate as a North Korean test missile.
When Oklahoma State University Head Football Coach Mike Gundy used that analogy at a press conference in late 2016 to dismiss the validity of most of the talk on sports-talk radio, he was referencing the way so many of the test-missile efforts by North Korea at that time were lucky even to launch, much less accurately strike a target.
From our vantage point looking back now from the future, we can see he did not consider the possibility of that failure rate declining enough that the missiles could represent a potential threat to many nations, even the United States. Nevertheless, Gundy did in a very few words did quite vividly express an essential sociological dynamic of commercial sports media that has notâand will notâchange.
I took quite a few more words to elaborate upon that dynamic in my 2015 book, How Postmodernism Explains Football , and Football Explains Postmodernism. That work demonstrated how the fundamental assertion of postmodernist theory âthat narratives, or explanatory stories, most often fail ultimately to reliably explain important social phenomenaâthrough analysis of media representations of football over the course of the gameâs existence.
Ever since American college students in the mid-nineteenth century began playing a brutal game that contributed some element of meaning to their lives that they felt their classes did not, its popularity spread inexorably and proved so fascinating to audiences that one mediated representation after another extended its reach still further. Over time, footballâs essential structure proved fundamentally ideal for both narrative drama and commercial exploitation.
The appeal of the game enabled it to survive early challenges that strove sincerely to banish it from civilized society. Reformers saw in the game a serious undermining of Americansâ physical, intellectual, and moral well being. But rule changes and its phenomenal popularity and commercial viability allowed it to flourishâas did the rise of two competing metanarratives.
First established was the Frank Merriwell model of a football player as an honorable hero, âthe picture of an honest, healthy straight-shooter, always on the side of truth and honor,â inspired by a fictional character whose proliferation in novels and magazine installments dominated media tropes for decades. But eventually, the darker side of the game gave rise to another model that championed the player as hedonist often bordering on sociopath. In fiction and in fact, the Billy Clyde Puckett model would prove so primally connected to footballâs essential appeal that it grew to rival and often muscle out Merriwellian themes in the meaning-making efforts of popular media.
Yet it is in the ongoing demonstration of the gameâs age-old inability to resolve what I characterized as its âBilly Clyde conundrum â that we can apprehend the even broader assertion of postmodernist theory âthat we are better off seeking a multiplicity of narratives than pretending grand resolutions are possible in the first place.
I proposed this as the ultimate lesson from that study: We may want grand answers, but we probably wonât get themâparticularly when it comes to our most prominent cultural institutions, like commercial football.
But what football and mediated sport more generally do for us instead is spawn the endless narratives that evidence suggests we actually need even more than reliable answers. Indeed, that seems to be a much more likely explanation for why both commercial football and the almost incomprehensibly vast media cosmos that it inspires not only exist but endure and mean so much to so many Americans.
So that, in a nutshell, was the scholarly contribution of How Postmodernism Explains Football âarguably as close to a unified theory as has been fully articulated for understanding the driving force that powers the sociological phenomenon represented by mediated commercial football, and to a great extent mediated sport more broadly: What I conceptualized in that study as the âhyper-mediated marketplace of commercial-football narratives.â
Our innate, seemingly insatiable need for mediated narratives of that sortâeven if most of them are no more reliable than the malfunctioning missiles of Coach Gundyâs analogyâprovides insight into the sociology not just of commercial football or even sport more generally but of so much societal obsession as manifest in recent decades. Similarly, hyper-mediated marketplaces of business, entertainment, politics, and so much more thrive on a scale beyond anything that could have been imagined a century before, or even just a few decades ago. Although many of the underlying component dynamics are not that new, it has been only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that technology has made possible for such an unprecedented multitude of narrative advancement and rejection to be experienced so commonly, so perpetuallyâbecause of the way that the reach of media as we know it has been multiplied exponentially. Almost overnight, it seems that reality has expanded through a technological and sociological transformation that extends galaxies beyond the traditional press and broadcast networks via endless talk radio, social media, blogging, posting, texting, and tweetingâjust to attempt to capture the uncapturable in a manageable few words.
This study seeks to build upon the theoretical constructs established in How Postmodernism Explains Football so as to provide a fuller body of descriptive analysis of the social interaction transpiring so profusely in the hyper-mediated marketplace of sports narratives.
It will consider that mass of narrative production and consumption at a more fundamental level, specifically examining the social structures and 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 importantâand make no mistake, the intensity of the interactions among participants demonstrates with consistency and clarity 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 itselfâor in more formally methodological language, interrogating for social significance this profusion of mediated representations of sport to consider how they contribute to recurring themes and dominant frames and encourage those involved to develop thematically consonant understandings. 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 âthe dynamic component of sport in society,â wrote sociologist Wilbert Marcellus Leonard in his classic A Sociological Perspective of Sport, emphasizing the critical elements of that activity as âthe repetitive and reoccurring interactional patterns characterizing individual and group transactions.â 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 âmore tolerant of diverse perspectives,â as cultural studies scholar David Nylund has discussed. The media venues where sports discourse flourishes in many ways provide âa socially sanctioned gossip sheet,â as media-studies scholar Lawrence A. Wenner has characterized it in discussing the qualities of sport communication scholarship in his volume Media, Sports, and Society, where âthe legitimized gossip⌠is about sporting events rather than social events, but it is socializing nonetheless.â
More broadly, this study contributes to greater understanding of what sociologist David Rowe formulated as âthe media sports cultural complex,â which he said, âsignifies both the primacy of the sports media and the great cultural formation of which it is part.â That complex is driven in significant part, as Wenner wrote in MediaSport (a title referencing his concept of the ânew genetic strainâ produced via âcultural fusing of sport with communicationâ) by the fact that sport is a source of âcontent that is more compelling to many than other artifacts and responsibilities of daily livingâ and provides âa conduit or medium through which feelings, values, and priorities are communicated.â Certainly, the analysis in this study will show, all that is most vividly documented in the socially interactive world of sports-talk radio.
The Vital Connection Between Postmodernist Theory and Mediated Sport
The way I put it in originally making the case for the vital relevance of this approach was to imagine that a top team of theorists of postmodernism had set to work in research-and-development laboratories to identify a textbook microcosm of human social activity that would vibrantly demonstrate their essential ideas at work. In that hypothetical scenario, they very well could come out with something along the lines of the mediated game of commercial football.
So the proposition re-asserted and extended for this study is that thinking about mediated sport and postmodernism in the manner put forth here can suggest useful understandings of complex phenomena and offer practical sociological insights into the human condition.
As I have noted before, some scholars of postmodernism will take issue with that propositionâor any such assertion put forth in so tangible and linear of terms. It suggests too strongly a narrative of such grand designâor metanarrativeâthat it presumes to offer explanatory power that postmodernist thought insists can never be presumed. That said, this study will press forward with drawing upon primal elements of postmodernist thought that fashion an approximate template of analysis for arriving at more essential meanings of concern in these pages.
Also as I have noted before, the rather unwieldy term approximate template cannot be avoided because even suggesting that any more formal method of analysis could conclusively be derived from postmodernist premises would beâin the most orthodox interpretation of postmodernist theory âtruly a narrative too grand. That school of thought rejects any mode of interpretation so clearly systematic.
The best articulations of postmodernist theory show us that so much of what we pretend is consistently and clearly explainable actually is not. The worst suggests that nothing is explainable. What might be characterized as a fundamentalist school of postmodernist thought can seem to suggest that anyone claiming to reliably explain postmodernism is an unreliable authority by definition. And working in this vineyard, one must concede the conceptual possibility that any attempt to explain postmodernism must indeed failâif the fallibility of metanarratives is considered an absolute, then any explanation of something as complex and nuanced as postmodernism must indeed fail. But then, holding an absolutist line on the fallibility of metanarratives would also mean that such a line itself represents a metanarrative that also can only fail. And clearly, not all scholars of postmodernism hold that any attempt to write accessibly about postmodernism must on its face be rejected as another failed metanarrative.
So, as in my previous work, this study embraces that line of scholarship and considers postmodernist thought too valuable to only be discussed either incomprehensibly or not at allâand further, too valuable to split hairs over narrow, technical definitions of key terms like metanarrative and narrative. The latter can be thought of here for everyday working purposes simply as stories told to explain or give meaning, and the former as a greater story told to explain many others. And then, it follows that we may also consider relatively lesser stories in terms of mini-narratives, micro-narratives, etc.
The postmodernist theory maintains that we accept all sorts of explanationsâincluding sometimes the really grand ones, the metanarrativesâthat ultimately canât actually tell us what we want to know, especially when we seek to reach practical insights into the most slippery and consequential mysteries of the human condition. So part of this chapter is devoted to laying out the case for asserting that what is perhaps the most vital element of mediated sport, sociologically, is inherent in the way it provides us as individuals and as a society remarkably compelling sources for expressing and consuming endless, ever-competing narratives in our primal quest to engage in the making of meaning.
Recognizing Mediated Sportâs Social Construction
Rather than providing any sort of âscientific reason or philosophical logic,â or even âcommon sense and accessibility,â literary scholar Simon Malpas observed, postmodernist theory as more often articulated âseeks to grasp what escapes these processes of definition and celebrates what resists or disrupts them.â Discourse on postmodernism is âoften associated with philosophical writings and social and political theories that are complex, dense, esoterically sophisticated and all too often replete with jargon and incomprehensible prose, which intimidate even the most sophisticated readers,â said Michael Drolet , who writes on the history of political thought.
Yet a persuasive body of related scholarship advances the assumption that within the concept of postmodernism, there is something more than âacademic irresponsibility and ivory-tower indifferenceâ that rejects âall wisdom of the pastâ by âplayfully appeal[ing] to our subjectivitiesâ but making âno genuine judgment of what is better or worse,â as philosopher Harvey Cormier put it. As utilized here to assert proposed understandings of complex phenomena, it can prove useful in advancing understanding of mediated sport as a phenomenon that has been societally constructed, even though it has grown so ubiquitous that it may feel as if it just is something that has been with us always, perhaps almost naturally. Linda Hutcheon , a literary theorist who has written extensively on postmodernism, characterized its âinitial concernâ as an effort âto de-naturalize some of the dominant features of our way of life; to point out that t...