The Sociology of Sports-Talk Radio (9-6-21)

Bud: "Luke, because your intro to Carl Schmitt, I no longer believe in Democracy, Human Rights or the Constitution. You should be kvelling with pride!"

Perhaps a thru-line to some of what I do is to create a little more space between people and their favorite stories. Ask: Why do I love this text? This interpretation? This story? Why do I hate this competing narrative? Why do I need this story?

https://www.ou.edu/gaylord/people/faculty/robert-kerr/Robert_Kerr2
https://www.wsj.com/articles/college-university-fall-higher-education-men-women-enrollment-admissions-back-to-school-11630948233
Robert L. Kerr, The Sociology of Sports-Talk Radio: A Descriptive Analysis (Palgrave Macmillan: New York, N.Y., 2017).
Robert L. Kerr, How Postmodernism Explains Football, and Football Explains Postmodernism: The Billy Clyde Conundrum (Palgrave MacMillan: New York, N.Y., 2015).

Robert L. Kerr: "So it is actually far from any wacky egghead notion to recognize the way that commercial sport represents–more than anything else–a compelling source of narratives that fulfill a deep sociological need. Indeed, if we holistically consider the full social reality of a mediated commercial sporting event, we can understand it to be nothing without the narratives that sponsors, participants, media, fans, and others impose upon it. For example, fans must embrace the notion that there is great significance for them—an explanatory story of some sort—in deeply bonding with one group of individual players wearing a particular uniform (rather than those wearing another), when in fact any player, in theory, could potentially be wearing one uniform or another. How, for example, would fans respond if the two teams in any given game decided at halftime to swap uniforms? Would fans still maintain the same bond with different players wearing “their” team’s uniforms? Or would the supposedly deep union between the fans and “their” players wearing one uniform endure when the players switched to the other team’s uniforms?

"In essence, what actually happens in all games of football at even the highest levels of play is no more than what happens when a bunch of kids get together on a field, court, or street, choose up sides, and see which can perform what is agreed upon to count as scores more often than the other team can. To that end, the participants will run and jump and throw and kick and swing and shove for some period of time—whatever the particulars of the game at hand may encompass. And beyond that, all meaning imposed upon those activities is narrative—an effort to develop stories with explanatory power. It offers textbook examples of processes that sociological scholars and others would call meaning-making, the social construction of reality, or narrative creation."

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