Intelligent exoskeletal devices (data gloves, data suits, robotic prostheses, intelligent second skins, and the like) will both sense gestures and serve as touch output devices by exerting forces and pressures. … Exercise machines increasingly incorporate computer-controlled motion and force feedback and will eventually become reactive robotic sports partners. … Today’s rudimentary, narrowband video games will evolve into physically engaging telesports … .
William Mitchell (1995, p. 19)
William Mitchell’s vision of future human–computer interactions helped to shape my interest in the relationship between sports and digital technology. His vision of a world where “intelligent exoskeletal devices” augment the range of human functions and the sensory experiences we enjoy resonated with my own views about the direction sports would take—a view that was also influenced by what was happening in biotechnology. In the late 1990s, cyborg researchers were drawing attention to the common ground shared by digital and biological systems, revealing new possibilities for how their integration could permit our experiencing a new kind of corporeal presence. In this context, it was becoming clear how such approaches to being in the world could create new kinds of possibilities in the realm of performance, not just in sports but in music and dance too.
Small changes in established sports also suggested that the structural parameters of sports were not sufficiently robust to accommodate the changing biological capacities of techno-scientific athletes—athletes whose careers, minds, and bodies had been shaped by insights from sport science and technology. For example, the ever-increasing speeds of men’s tennis serves generated debate about changing some elements of the sport’s physical dimensions—for example, increasing the size of the ball or raising the height of the net. While members of the governing bodies of established sports considered how to modify their games to maintain their integrity, others considered how new kinds of sports, designed for these enhanced humans, may emerge. In the case of the latter, Mitchell imagined a world of “remote arm-wrestling, teleping-pong, virtual skiing and rock-climbing”—a veritable feast of cyborgian experiences made for our growing bionic capacities.
Mitchell’s posthuman future coincided with another of my influences, typified in the performance art of Stelarc (Smith 2005). Rarely does one find reference to Stelarc in the sports literature, but his pioneering work in exploring the cyborg interface has relevance for how one imagines the future of sports. Stelarc’s exoskeletal machines and digitally immersive devices offered a glimpse into a future in which our movement and thoughts would be mediated by technology—a future in which artificial intelligence converges with robotics and new forms of human agency bring forth new ways of experiencing embodied action. Back in the 1990s, many of these possibilities were realized only in the creative performances of artists such as Stelarc, in the novels of authors such as William Gibson, and the writings of intellectuals such as William Mitchell. Some of the ideas seem crude today; when they were first articulated, however, rapid accomplishments in digital technology were beginning to show how such scenarios could soon be realized. As the new millennium began, the development of digital technology by a new generation of netizens was provoking a shift in how people consumed media, and a population of “prosumers” (Toffler 1970) was beginning to emerge. These new digital communities were more concerned with producing digital media content than with consuming it, and this growing desire to be active rather than passive in our technological culture does much to help explain why these possible futures are so compelling.
As digital devices and sports cultures develop, humanity comes ever closer to an era of virtually constituted sports performances in which the primary medium of participation is not a physical playing field but a digitally mediated space. Consider the recently launched Oculus Rift experience produced by the company Virtually Live, which uses motion-tracking technology to capture the movements of players within a live soccer match. It then translates the data into a computer-generated Oculus experience, allowing the user to feel as though he or she is a spectator within the stadium, sitting in the stands and watching the match in real time. A number of questions pertinent to this book arise from these prospects. For example, how would such conditions change sports experiences, physical activity, and people’s sense of what it is to be embodied? How would the technology change the social meaning attributed to sports, the social function of sports, and the way in which sports create participatory communities? Would sports begin to occupy a different place within our social and cultural lives, if our experience of them is played out in virtual realities? Furthermore, what are the consequences of making corporeality a surrogate to a virtual economy, thus creating a physical culture that is defined largely by digital interactions? Would we even make the distinction if the simulation were perfect?
Finding ways to answer these questions—and others that follow from them—is what interests me about the subject of digital sports. This book begins by considering how such technologies challenge how we think about performance, liveness, and the idea of the virtual, then explores how sports are delivering new kinds of experiences through digital technology. Thus, the book first investigates what is understood by a number of concepts that are brought into question by these developments. Specifically, it considers the meanings of “sports,” “games,” and “play” and how our understanding of them changes when they are situated within a taxonomy of digital leisure practices. It also explores the differences and the similarities between the two primary cultural experiences under discussion: sports culture and digital culture. For instance, how does play within computer culture differ from play within sports? Are there similarities that explain their convergence and that permit one to argue that games occurring within virtual worlds should be afforded the same status as sports? These initial inquiries also outline the range of digital sports subcultures that have roles to play in articulating the rich history of what I call “Sport 2.0,” a term that denotes a transition from an analog to a digital way of producing and experiencing sports.
Experiences within virtual worlds have already become inextricable from many other aspects of living. From remote surgical procedures in medicine to managing the global economy, life online is a constitutive element of many societies around the world today. And to varying degrees, participation in a digital economy enables people to traverse other technological divides. For example, in developing countries with limited technological infrastructure or little economic stability, the use of mobile telephones has been a crucial part of the local economy for at least a decade (Plant 2003), and the rise of smart devices is growing especially quickly in such areas. Furthermore, digital products have become a constitutive feature of the creative and cultural industries—which include sports—and they are intimately connected to how licensing, sponsorship, branding, and a host of other creative media practices are monetized. Digital products are also central to strategies for optimizing the commercial potential of any brand.
Perhaps most crucial is the fact that life online occupies the space around our most intimate (private) and most collective (public) experiences. For example, in November 2015, when terrorist attacks by ISIS took place in Paris, one of the most immediate reactions was from the social network Facebook—not just the users, but also the company. Their collective intervention was to encourage their users to change their profile pictures so as to incorporate the colors of the French flag. Overnight, millions of Facebook users’ identities became politicized by Facebook’s enabling them to take part in an act of solidarity, which changing one’s profile picture was designed to convey. Thus, a social-media platform had allowed millions of people to unite around a single gesture, fusing a universal symbol with a unique image—one’s photograph—in an act of visible defiance. Of course, these are not simply gestures of solidarity, and later in the book I will consider the complex geopolitical effects of such gestures and how one cannot regard social-media platforms—especially large ones—as simply politically neutral social spaces. Indeed, this aspect of social media raises important considerations for why they often act as editorialized platforms, not just distribution networks for content produced by other editors.
How processes such as those described above are affecting sports experiences, and, more broadly, what this may mean for how we make sense of the role of sports in society, have been largely overlooked. Moreover, while aspects of the subject are pertinent especially to the internal logic and ecosystem of sports, they also speak to wider societal concerns. For instance, chapter 10 discusses how users of social media reacted to the involvement of British Petroleum (BP) in the 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic program. BP was a leading domestic sponsor whose involvement attracted considerable controversy and resistance, most of which was made manifest within digital environments. In this case, the reactions were underpinned by a wider concern about climate change and the use of fossil fuels. The Olympic Games are often subject to similar attacks, criticisms, and even violence, which make it especially useful to consider them as an indicator of global social concerns.
Sport 2.0 also provides a way towards re-evaluating the assumptions we make about digital culture, as may be said of computer games. Despite having enjoyed more than twenty years of life online, computer game cultures remain a subject of popular controversy. Computer game cultures are still criticized for their supposedly generating more passive populations, addictive habits, or even violent and anti-social behavior. These allegations are often directed at specific, prominent examples of digital games, such as Grand Theft Auto (an action-adventure game set in fictional American cities where the player’s goal is to ascend within an organized crime community). Yet these allegations make dubious assumptions about what takes place within such environments; they also tend to treat gaming as a singular community, when in fact it is diverse. Alternative forms of gaming indicate how digital participation can inspire extraordinary levels of creativity and imaginative engagement to the point where “gamification” has become an ideal means of engagement across a range of sectors. For instance, in recent years the Wellcome Trust, a large science funding body, launched a program to gamify one’s PhD, and many forms of citizen science programs employ gaming, as a means of encouraging involvement within such projects. The alternative depictions of gaming I wish to discuss draw more on its capacity to nurture politically engaged citizenship and a rise in creative practice. This capacity becomes even more apparent when the format is aligned with sports.
In each case, digital technology must be seen as an opportunity for creative expression, or social engagement, rather than as detracting from it. Indeed, anxieties about life online may reveal themselves historically as concerns of a pre-mobile digital age, a period of time in which society was anxious about change, the erosion of the physical world, and uncertain about how digitally mediated communication was changing how we relate to one another. As mobile devices transform computers into hand-held objects and, increasingly, wearable technologies, being online is looking very different from how it looked twenty years ago. Today, life online is more akin to the taken-for-granted value we attribute to electricity or other essential services. Indeed, some societies are beginning to advance the idea that access to the Internet should be treated as a human right. Understood in this way, life online and life offline are not obviously qualitatively different.
In this context, this book considers how discourses on digital culture apply to sports. For example, although most of our digital experiences are still mediated through our fingers and hands, does our evaluation of their worth change once these experiences are transformed into activities that demand more physical exertion from us, and, thus, activities in which a clearer relationship between the physical and the virtual experience is apparent? We begin to see glimpses of this in the self-tracking technologies of mobile running applications. Recently the worldwide Pokémon Go craze has generated new conversations about how mobile technology can create new opportunities for physical activity, exploration, and seeing physical places differently. Should it become clear that our evaluation of the digital world changes as a consequence of such trends, our evaluation of the worth of time spent in digital worlds might also change.
This book examines the creative use of emerging digital technology within sports culture in order to reveal the complex ways in which practices such as those mentioned above are changing our views about digital space. Both sports and digital worlds are changing, and a significant part of that change may be attributed to their convergence—digital experiences are becoming more physically enabled through wearable technologies, and sports are becoming more digitized through sharing, big data, and immersive spectator experiences. In this context, I explore how the culture of physicality that surrounds digital life is transforming how we make sense of the desirability of these developments. More precisely, I argue that the advanced use of digital technologies in sports transforms them into new kinds of cultural experiences—experiences that are defined by different values and expectations and which are constituted by new populations of practitioners. In short, digital technology is changing everything about sports culture, including the people taking part, the places where it occurs, and the purposes to which it is put. In turn, the changing culture of sports—marked by the rise of alternative sports—is causing the digital environment to change.
Yet there remains a degree of ambivalence about the value of digital technology within the sports industry, at least as a tool for changing how sports should be played. Critics argue that technology is increasingly dehumanizing the athlete’s experience, perhaps even overtaking the human contribution to the results of competitions—a trend that many traditionalists resist. Such arguments are not unique to digital technology; for example, they have been advanced toward a range of technological changes in Formula One auto racing. Alternatively, the value of digital technology in sport has been questioned over its tendency to replace the role of officials. Thus, in an era of pervasive camera technology, the playing field becomes a living manifestation of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon in which automated devices govern and regulate the behavior of players as well as ensure that more accurate decisions are made about important results. In such a world, the role of a human referee appears to be compromised and some aspect of sport may be lost as a result.
Despite these concerns about the erosion of human agency in sport as a result of digitally embodied physical activity, there are compelling societal reasons to support such trends. For instance, “Sport 2.0” offers a preview of an era in which sports will no longer be played in environmentally unfriendly places in the physical world, which often become “white elephants” for cities or cause large-scale disruption in resource allocation. Instead, sports will move toward a more sustainable, digital world in which their only environmental burden will be hard-drive space and electricity use. Already one can observe growing support for such new sporting worlds through criticisms about the unsustainability of some sports (such as golf, which is often played in countries with limited water supplies). The rise of the eSport athlete—athletes whose competition is playing computer games—may thus be a prologue to a new era for sport in which such events as virtual golf would thrive. Consequently, this book also investigates the concerns that surround the growth of our life online and the impact of convergence between virtual and non-virtual worlds. In this context, I introduce the notion of second-wave convergence, which focuses attention on the sharing of content and on the means of production as a conditioning characteristic of digital culture. In turn, this characteristic is also shaping sports experiences, which become increasingly tied to the utilization of digital technologies.
The broader implications of the increase in digital immersion are already apparent off the playing field. Expectations of participatory digital media have become constitutive of 21st-century citizenship, and the sports spectator’s experience is increasingly indicative of this. Furthermore, the debates about a growing “digital divide”—which were prominent in early studies of life online—have shifted in the past ten years, requiring a more nuanced view when explaining what is happening within less digitally developed nations. Although it is difficult to deny that there probably will always be a digital divide, the characteristics of this divide have changed. We now are less concerned about access to technology and more concerned about access to knowledge systems that make participation possible. For example, while one might appeal to the ubiquity of mobile devices or blogging platforms, the proliferation of device technology, operating systems, and open-source solutions requires the end user to quickly adapt to new interfaces that demand ongoing reskilling in order to remain a participant. To some extent, this reflects a shift from Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, but this is just one way of characterizing what has changed.
Despite the challenge associated with democratizing digital technology, there are reasons to be optimistic about the empowering consequences of the shift in the divide which I describe. For instance, the success of Sugata Mitra’s “hole in the wall” program to bring computing to areas of considerable poverty, by just leaving computers out in the open for people to use, shows how creative approaches to distributing computing technology can be a gateway to a wider education and even a vehicle of education reform, especially in places with limited infrastructure and public services. People, it would seem, can figure out how to narrow the digital literacy divide themselves, but to do so they need the digital divide to be a thing of the past. The ambitions of Facebook and Google to bring the Internet to the parts of the world that don’t yet have it offer a glimpse of the radical transformation the world is about to see.
Overall, this book brings together various aspects of digital technology in sports, covering activities ranging from Olympic competition to computer gaming and remote spectatorship. The Olympic Games, which have always been a showcase for media innovation, provide a way to observe these developments over time. For instance, Olympic Games were the first events to publicly showcase such televisual innovations as slow-motion replay and live satellite broadcasts. The research will show how this innovation is advanced not only by owners of media technology but also, increasingly by users. The Games are also interesting since there are a range of activities that operate around the sports competitions, which are gradually connecting the digital worlds of sport and culture. Through new media technologies, the Olympic Games have become an incubator for the use of novel fan experiences, such as the development of urban screens, providing digital public spaces for celebration that now accompany hosting an Olympic Games. These spaces expand the audience experience and give rise to new opportunities for thinking about how audiences encounter sport remotely. Furthermore, they transform how people engage with public space and become a defining component of collective celebration. Additionally, mobile technology has become an integral part of the Olympic Games broadcasting experience, the torch relay (more accurately, a flame relay) playing a leading role via mobile devices. Athletic competitions mirror this use, from the utilization of digital navigation and tracking devices in sailing to the use of Hawkeye technology in tennis umpiring, digital technology is part of the fabric of the elite sports competition.
Thus, the Olympic Games are an arena in which new technologies are implemented and sports take on their role as instantiations of human evolution, both the athletic performance of the participants and the technological grandstanding of their entourage seeking to demonstrate how far humanity has advanced. Making sense of these embedded identities of, especially, elite sports is crucial to understanding their future trajectory and social role. Furthermore, the Olympic Games give rise to remarkable spectator innovation, both in terms of how the Games are viewed remotely and as a vehicle for creating new kinds of spectator experience. This is why the book also focuses on how digital technology is transforming what the Olympic Games mean to their audience, which encompasses both sports fans and those who regard the Olympics as an important social movement.
The expansion of digital technology offered through my characterization of “Sport 2.0” also offers more opportunities for the Olympic brand to reach more people, though I endeavor also to reveal where these opportunities may give rise to social concern. For example, the large urban screens that occupy cities during Olympics constantly displaying the Olympic messages may also be seen as a form of indoctrination into celebrating an event which many people do not believe to be simply politically neutral as Olympic family would want to argue. This raises questions about the omnipotence of mega-events and their capacity to undermine expressions of citizenship, exemplified by State of Exception, Jason O’Hara’s film about preparations for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Summer Games. In this context, digital resistance becomes an indirect consequence of the Olympic industry and a key mechanism through which citizens can challenge these impositions. In this context, the book documents and scrutinizes the transformations of sports that is occurring through digital technology, while considering the ideological questions it provokes about how people make sense of themselves and their societies in a post-analog age. Thus, I will explain how these two trajectories—from the individual to the societal—are intimately intertwined in the context of sport and digital technology. Furthermore, I consider what this means for the future of performance and participation in one of the most universal of cultural practices: sport.
The book is divided into three parts and ten chapters, which take the reader through the central questions arising from the development of “Sport 2.0.” Part I focuses on how digital technology is changing sport experiences from a wide range of perspectives, while also providing some of the book’s philosophical underpinning. Chapter 1 considers the different cultures of sport, digital technology, and the Olympics. It explores how much further there is still to go before one can talk about a global digital culture that has become inextricable from all aspects of our lives. It also discusses how sports cultures have begun to change and, in particular, become subservient to media change, and what this will mean for how various systems of governance develop their approach to culture. This inquiry leads to questioning what it is that makes sports experiences distinct and meaningful—in short, their social function and value—a theme that is taken up later in the book. This chapter also explores the societal justification for sports, so as to understand how digital technology challenges or responds to these interests. Finally, through analyzing Olympic culture (perhaps the most prominent example of an ideology-driven sports-related program), chapter 1 considers how the Olympic movement has become a central driver in shaping the values of sports culture and business and what it will need to do in the future to retain this place in the sports system.
Chapter 2 sets out the theoretical dimensions of the book. It begins by discussing the current conceptual understandings of virtual reality, computer culture and sport. It identifies the book’s major themes, arguments, problems and possibilities, including reference to the major, pertinent philosophical notions of games and sport, integrating the seminal work of Bernard Suits and Brian Sutton-Smith, and how discussions about digital culture and sport relate to them. This is where the book’s main questions are formulated and where the pivotal concept of unreality is explored to identify areas of common ground in theoretical work on sports and digital culture. In particular, I consider the way in which a certain kind of sense of the physical world arises within digital space, often through the design interface that mediate our experiences. Keyboards, mice, and gesture technology are crucial determinants of the language used to discuss the value of computer games and sports as mechanisms of embodied action, limited by design, but capable of being disrupted by new forms of interaction design.
A latent question within this discussion concerns the prospect of sports simulation and whether the optimal interface will be that which permits the seamless simulation of a sports event to such an extent that there would no longer be a need for real-world or off-line sport spaces. This question is not unique to the sport case, but is discussed more explicitly toward the end of the book as a fundamental consequence of the inquiry and a very real possible future for sport. The chapter also discusses how examples of life online require us to reconsider what we acknowledge as real or meaningful in human experience and how this evaluation is contextualized within a set of ideological assumptions about the nature of virtual realities. It introduces the idea of second-wave convergence to explain how socio-technical changes within such practices as sports give rise to new evaluations of life online. Furthermore, it discusses how our nostalgia for analog lives is particularly apparent within practices such as sports, which are constituted by a presumed notion of what embodied action and corporeality should entail. In pursuing this argument, the chapter also questions how one defines embodiment and considers, in particular, how wearable technology is challenging the view that digital identities are separable from our analog lives.
Part II draws together these analyses and focuses on the broad ways in which digital technologies have affected elite and amateur sports experiences, along with considering how they have re-constituted the spectator’s proximity to the action. Chapter 3 examines how digital technologies are affecting the elite athlete’s experience of sport, but also the other individuals around the athlete, such as officials. The first section of the chapter focuses on performance technology and discusses various examples of elite sports simulations and the emerging digitization of movement, which underpins new sport technologies. While it cautions against claiming that digital technology is radically extending an athlete’s potential, it explores changing processes in athletic experience, notably in training, which arise from digital devices and systems. Moreover, it discusses how knowledge arising from digitization is shaping an athlete’s experience of sport. The chapter also argues for the virtualization of physicality within a range of sport forms, both elite and non-elite.
Chapter 4 focuses on how the amateur athletic experience is being modified by digital technology and how this requires us to re-evaluate computer culture. It focuses particularly on game-based experiences—both the development of computer games and the use of devices that create game-like experiences for an amateur athlete. Moreover, it demonstrates how digital gaming has become an integral part of the amateur sporting experience and suggests why this is important. For example, it discusses the specific context of physical education and how various pedagogic assumptions about computing technology that are apparent within education may be challenged as a result of these technological transformations. The embodied intelligence of virtual gaming can provide a further mechanism through which to teach sports and to promote new forms of socialization. The chapter also considers specific examples of physically active games—often called serious games, or what Taylor (2012) describes as “embodied play”—which are emerging as alternative forms of sports activity. These examples support the claim that gaming technology is becoming more sport-like, thus challenging the assumption that computer game playing necessarily leads to a more sedentary lifestyle. The rise of the e-sports gaming industry is indicative of this at an elite level, but so too is the growth of digitally enabled communities of physical activity. This chapter also sets up the argument for framing the book through the idea of “Sport 2.0,” denoting an emerging sports community that is beginning to occupy the place of traditional sports and which has the potential to overtake it in numerous ways.
Chapter 5 moves toward analyzing the spectator’s experience of digital technology in sport. Amateur athletes are part of the spectator community and there are clear ways in which amateurs are connected with elite athletes through spectatorship. However, I also propose that spectating is changing through the development of digital interactive experiences, such as urban screens, TV on demand, mobile technology, and social media. To this end, this chapter focuses on such transformations to the spectator experience, toward what may be called, remote participation—a concept that alludes to Sherry Turkle’s (2011) insights into digital culture. The chapter also asks whether the concept of spectator still makes sense in the context of immersive viewing experiences where the witness is brought into the space of the activity, rather than simply occupying a third person perspective. The most recent example of such a trend is the GoPro and VISLINK head camera broadcasting within the NHL, pioneered in January 2015.
Part III shifts the discussion away from the culture of sport practice toward the specific context of sports production and consumption, by discussing the Olympic Games, as an exemplar of digital media innovation in sports. The chapters in this part will appeal particularly to scholars of media change, as it documents the rise of citizen journalism and alternative news production practices that occur around sports events. Many of the arguments presented here are informed by my empirical research around the Olympic Games from Sydney 2000 to Rio de Janeiro 2016.
Chapter 6 provides an historical examination of how the Olympic movement has courted relationships that have allowed it to innovate and operate at the cutting edge of media production. It also explores how the expansion of the mega-event media industries have led to greater exclusivism over reporting privileges that has narrowed the lens through which reporting takes place—even if the coverage volume has increased. It also explores the detail of how the Olympic Games stimulate discussions about media change around the world.
Chapter 7 focuses on the emergence of new journalist communities at the Olympic Games, which articulate how its media community has grown. It argues that the expansion of the Olympic “fringe” journalist community results from the exclusive arrangements that surround sports reporting, but also the growing expansion of large sports events to become more like cultural festivals, which attract the interests of non-sports reporters. In so doing, the chapter charts the rise of the non-accredited media center and its strategic role for Olympic hosts, made possible by the extended means of reporting via digital technologies. While the chapter urges caution in claiming that this expansion reveals a trajectory toward greater media freedom at the Games, it does identify how media expansion is changing the way that traditional media organizations operate, provoking a democratization of media expertise and the re-professionalization of journalism.
Chapter 8 focuses on how the rise of social media has transformed media events. First, it considers the characteristics of the Web 2.0 era and what influences this has had on mediating sports cultures. Second, it considers how the Olympic industry has organized its response to this new communication architecture, providing guidance to its community. Next, it explores how social media may threaten the financial base of the Games, considering how to monetize Olympic social-media content. Subsequent sections in this chapter consider the risks of open media, the expansion of the user experience by digital technology and the parallels between open-source volunteers and the Olympic volunteer ethos. In so doing, the chapter articulates a vision for digital culture that is born out of the values of social media, as an ideological force that coheres with the Olympic vision and with a broad perspective on the potential contribution of sports in society.
Chapter 9 provides a detailed analysis of the social-media interventions surrounding the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games, widely discussed as the first social-media Olympics.1 It examines how social-media platforms were instrumental in generating news content during these Games—not just distributors of the news of others—while also discussing how the organizing committee, stakeholders, and audiences contributed to generating the record breaking volume of social-media content that came out around these Games.
Chapter 10—the culmination of the book’s trajectory from the individual to the societal, which began in part I—focuses on how digital culture is shaping citizenship, by creating alternative channels of communication, activity and expression, which demand our occupation. Whereas chapter 9 explored the celebration of the Olympic Games through social media, chapter 10 considers resistance to these expectations, by discussing examples of Olympic protest and antagonistic reactions online. These forms of alternative or disruptive media narratives are, I argue, a necessary component of the Olympic industry and a crucial means through which the Olympic ideal can assert itself as a movement, rather than just a sports event.
The conclusion consolidates the case for how sports are becoming increasingly digitized practices and why “Sport 2.0” is a necessary way of imagining sport’s future. It also expands our consideration of digital life toward biological configurations, building on earlier chapters to describe how digital technology is transforming the athlete’s biology and how this changes the conditions of future sporting encounters. It discusses the implications of these ideas, which encompass the need to remove sports from their physical worlds and to relocate them in digital space. Furthermore, it acknowledges how the interface between the biological and digital worlds will transform sports and other physical cultures in the future, for instance, through increasingly intelligent prosthetic devices.
While writing the book, I often asked myself “What relevance will a book about digital technology have in such a rapidly changing world?” Partial answers can be found in an understanding of the history of such changes and in an acknowledgment of the importance of resisting the pressure to elevate the importance of real-time occurrences over historical occurrences or future trends. However, the relevance of any book about technological change is more crucially found in recognizing a series of trends that suggest what sport’s future will look like. In this sense, Sport 2.0 may be seen as a new chapter in this history, as we begin to weave together physical experience and the digital world.