Conclusion

This book has explored the digital ecosystem that surrounds sports in the 21st century, which show how they have become deeply intertwined with complex digital configurations. These systems are so vast now that it is reasonable to ask whether there is any future for physical spaces within sports, but the growth of e-sports shows how Sport 2.0 leads to a re-imagination of space, place, and physicality. Indeed, my central proposition throughout this book is not that the future of sport will be free from physicality, or that digital corporeality will replace physical activity. Rather, I have argued that it is necessary to consider new designs for their inter-relationship, as spectators, athletes, and officials become components of a wider biodigital infrastructure, much more connected than ever before. In the same way that people may think of themselves as intimately connected to their mobile devices, be those watches, bracelets, or phones, the future of sport for athletes, spectators, and officials will be characterized by the integration of digital technologies. It is now time for sports to abandon the distinctions between physical and digital ways of being. In sports culture the evidence of this is overwhelming. Indeed, even the idea of wearable technologies may soon become outmoded as ingestible technologies emerge. For example, in September 2015 the US Food and Drug Administration awarded Otsuka Pharmaceuticals and Proteus Digital Health the first license for a form of medication with a built-in sensor. The technology allows a mobile device to connect with the medicinal product as it travels through the patient’s body:

When ABILIFY with the embedded ingestible sensor is taken, the ingestible sensor sends a signal to the wearable Proteus patch after it reaches the stomach. The patch records and time-stamps the information from the ingestible sensor in addition to collecting other patient metrics, including rest, body angle and activity patterns. This information is recorded and relayed to patients on a mobile phone or other Bluetooth-enabled device, and only with their consent, to their physician and/or their caregivers. Patients view the information using a secure and local software application on their mobile phone or device. Physicians and caregivers view the data using secure web portals. (Proteus 2015)

Such digital systems are not just technological; they are also cultural, social, political, aesthetic, and moral. Their ubiquity allows organizations, individuals, and communities to re-negotiate how they exist in the world, to the point where one may now speak of a digital ideology that pervades all aspects of life. The consequences of this new world view are manifold and sometimes contradictory; however, as more data is generated, yielding insights into our lives, there are growing concerns about how the data will be used, who owns it, and what we might be subjected to as a result of its being managed by commercial companies.

We are only beginning to see the consequences of the shift toward digital societies, and many of the values of today’s sporting culture will have only limited relevance for the new digital world. High performance, the increased precision and predictability of events, and the increased parity among competitors are causing sports to radically revisit their values, returning to a more ritual-based culture, rather than one that is focused on records and results. After all, in a world where first place and eighth place are so close that the average spectator can no longer tell who has won, there may be other reasons to watch sports than to see who is the victor. In such a world, digital mediation will become even more crucial and will become a way of disturbing and tweaking the field of play. Consider what takes place in the new sport of Formula E auto racing, in which the performance of a car can be affected by the audience’s enthusiasm. According to the Formula E website, fans can give their favorite driver a performance boost by voting before the race; “the three drivers with the most votes will each receive one five-second ‘power boost,’ temporarily increasing their car’s power from 150 kW (202.5 bhp) to 180 kW (243 bhp).” These novel propositions show how the assumptions we make about the relationship between athlete and spectator can be changed.

The opening chapters of the book located the discussion about Sport 2.0 in a wider philosophical context that draws on play and game theory. By making sense of the connections between digital culture and sports culture—along with their manifestation as Olympic culture—one can see how this transformation into digitally mediated sports is occurring. Sports need digital technology in order to advance as cultural pursuits, especially as audiences and physically active people grow to expect a data-driven lifestyle. One key area of common ground within this relationship is in the rise of digital gaming, which reveals—like sports—a desire to forge alternative worlds, and is further evidence of why sport and digital lives are moving in similar directions.

The specifics of these shifts are also apparent in how digital technology supports elite athletes in the pursuit of their achievements. Whether for performance feedback or for practice through simulation, digital solutions offer effective ways for athletes to enrich their knowledge about which areas of their performance may need improvement. Officials can draw on technology to make better judgments, and athletes can develop their public personas by utilizing social media. The rise of serious gamers as elite athletes is a further reason for why traditional sports—and their athletes—need to come to terms with the digital turn in their industry. After all, sporting celebrities are very well placed to exploit their audiences’ interests, but they risk being marginalized by the burgeoning e-sports industry, which is developing its own markets, its own systems of monetization and broadcast, and its own distinct brands. If the game-development community remains absent from traditional sports, then sports face a future in which they are further marginalized and less relevant to younger populations, for whom the location of those new experiences—online—is more familiar than traditional collective spaces, such as gymnasiums and sports halls. The same is true of spectators, who have ever-growing demands for personalized, unique point of view experiences. Spectators like to take photographs and videos at live events because doing so is a creative act that leads to further investment in the experience—it personalizes the memory and allows a fan to feel more a part of what took place. This “eyewitness” aspect of sports spectatorship is why the future of digital spectating is not bleak. Rather, it is likely to be characterized by hyper-mediated encounters with extraordinary levels of technological mediation.

Three notable shifts apparent in the Olympic Games explain why the e-sports community is so tied to online and mobile media. The first is the shift within the professional media, which is changing in demographic and in terms of what they do at an Olympic Games. The diversification of platforms on which media outlets locate their content reveals a new hierarchy of media power, in which third-party social-media platforms such as Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and Instagram have become crucial to engaging audiences. In turn, journalists are required to figure out how to use these platforms effectively; writers must be photographers; and everyone must be a video journalist. It is also apparent that the larger an event becomes, the more likely it is to draw journalists from other areas of interest, not just sports. The rise of the non-accredited journalist at the Olympic Games and the growth of citizen journalism are further indications of these changes. Because the Olympic Games rely on the exclusive access to content afforded to the accredited media, the challenge for the IOC is to enable this new population of reporters to produce content that does not compromise these arrangements but can ensure that the Games deliver the most comprehensive coverage that allow them to assert themselves as a social movement, not just a sports event. Embracing alternative media is crucial to this, but the Games have yet to find a way to embrace this kind of journalism without over-managing it.

In the first decade of the revolution brought about by social media, the world has seen Twitter contribute to the so-called Arab Spring of 2009, the emergence of WikiLeaks, the emergence of augmented-reality devices and wearable cameras, and an explosion of e-sports gaming. Where does this leave society? How can these changes be for the better, rather than just more of the same? In April 2016, Twitter signed a contract with the NFL to live-stream football matches within their micro-blogging platform, signaling a huge shift in what kinds of experiences people can expect to enjoy within the Twitter platform. The agreement is also a powerful statement on the future of television, which further reinforces the potential of the e-sport model, and the expansion of mediated sport into novel environments. In 20 years from now, television as we know it today may no longer exist.

In the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Games, one of the most poignant moments was the appearance of Tim Berners-Lee at the end of a portion of the ceremony that focused on the roles of social media and digital technology in the lives of young people. That portion of the ceremony began as homage to British popular culture, taking viewers from the early 1950s right up to the present. Berners-Lee’s appearance at the head of the stage, sitting behind a computer, became iconic of the ceremony and of the 2012 Games, widely discussed as the first social-media Olympics. The artistic director of the ceremony, Danny Boyle, was widely thought to have promoted a series of political ideas through the ceremony, one of which was epitomized by this brief segment.

The ceremony in London concluded with a graphical display of a quotation from Berners-Lee, “This is for everyone”—words that were also sent by Berners-Lee while in the stadium via Twitter. The quote conveyed the sentiment that the Internet should be free, open, and, above all, beneficial to the whole of humanity. At a time when the British government and others elsewhere were investing in greater control of the Internet, this was a particularly important statement to make to the world. Berners-Lee’s full tweet confirms the underlying values of this section: “This is for everyone #london2012 #oneweb #openingceremony @webfoundation @w3c.” His highlighting of the World Wide Web Foundation and the World Wide Web Consortium as organizations that champion a free, open, and accessible Web reinforced the message.

This message provides a sound basis on which to conclude this book. The world of elite sports pivots on two values that are often in opposition: competitiveness and cooperation. In part II of the book, I dealt principally with the competitive side of sports, the utilization of digital technology to achieve competitive or regulative improvements. In part III, I focused on the opportunities afforded by digital technology to promote cooperation and the sharing of sport experiences. For decades, sports have thrived as a result of successfully managing these two principles to promote excitement and anticipation within sports, while also generating increasingly large audiences and more varied modes of participation.

The growing population of digitally engaged citizens may simply be evidence of the involuntary shift from an analog to a digital society. It may not be an indication of a more computer-literate society, or even of a society that has found digital technology to offer exciting new modes of personal experience. Blogging, photo sharing, video sharing, and virtual reality are indications of such change, but they risk also being indicative of more widely networked trivia rather than of content that can change the world.

Expectations of digital culture have always been framed in such a way, but is it reasonable to have such high goals for new technology? Indeed, if social change is expected of digital technology, then what kind of change is sought? The most celebrated uses of digitally enabled empowerment have focused on forms of political activism—literally attempts to transform political systems. Yet change can occur every day and have important political consequences, though they may not involve disruption to power relationships. Alternatively, the use of online chat can dramatically improve a person’s relationships, particularly in an increasingly mobile world.

It is also apparent that being digitally engaged cannot just involve being part of a developer community, or being a citizen journalist. To this extent, it is both naive and undesirable to isolate digital participatory culture from society and culture generally, as if only participation in the former is an effective mode of social change. This acknowledgment may require that we set an optimal ratio of digital citizenship, say shifting from a situation in which there are 2 percent producers and 98 percent consumers to one in which there are 20 percent producers and 80 percent consumers. Alternatively, one might propose an ideal digital era in terms of a percentage of time online. For example, perhaps an ideal scenario is one in which 100 percent of users dedicate 10 percent of their time online to production and the remaining 90 percent to consumption. This may seem simplistic, but the point is that if 100 percent of digital citizens were to spend 100 percent of their time producing content there would be no chance to consume or interpret what is available, so we must be able to assert some claims about an optimal ratio.

It may also be necessary to reassert how the movement of information corresponds to social action in a digitally mediated era. For example, could we envisage a time when it may be concluded that an optimal number of blogs or media outlets has been reached, beyond which further information would lead to oversaturation or even disengagement with the agencies of such information? Might we make such a claim about today’s media? An initial response to this would be to draw attention to the different roles of information. For instance, information may be important for the purpose of present-day debate, relevant to democratic processes. Yet it might also have historical value, the importance of which will not be fully realized until some time has passed. Arguably, society has become so focused on the former that the value of the latter has been overlooked; but why should information be of use only in the present? Digital platforms such as SnapChat, which are valued because the content generated disappears soon after it is shared, may be a resistance to the idea that all digital artifacts will be around forever, but it may also jeopardize our ability to understand history.

Given the rise of digital technology, the growth in virtual-reality systems, the greater public engagement with and use of digital systems, and the expansion of all these elements within the world of sport, I return to the original conceptual foundations of this book and ask whether there is now any need for games to exist in the physical world. In view of their burden on the world’s resources, why not migrate sports entirely into the virtual world and wave goodbye to the physical-world sports that currently dictate the conditions of elite and amateur participation? After all, trends toward virtualization are apparent in all other walks of life. Never again would rain stop play in golf or cricket, or be a burden on the world’s water resources. Never again would a city be burdened by a need to create “white elephant” stadiums to house fleeting sports events. Instead, the world could pool its resources and invest in developing radical digital solutions, the benefits of which would trickle down into society at large—something like a space program for the sports world. Athletic teams would not need vast amounts of funds to travel across the world to compete in events, promoting a more democratic participation. The unpredictability of the natural world need never again compromise the integrity of a competition result, as powerful simulations could precisely stabilize all irrelevant environmental variations, which lead to unfair inequalities.

Even while writing this, recognizing that these possibilities articulate many of the values sports endeavor to promote, I can imagine the responses of sports administrators and enthusiasts around the world. For instance, the Olympic Games trade on the social value of bringing the world together in one place at one time. It is for this reason that the IOC resists even the idea of two neighboring cities’ sharing the burden of the Games. But what would really be lost if sports were to take the logic of virtual worlds to an extreme? Sports would still require considerable international collaboration—perhaps even more than they now do—to produce competitions entirely within virtual worlds. There would be no sense in which sport would lose its role as a social movement, aimed at fostering more effective geopolitical relationships. Indeed, if one considers the raging debates about the management of the World Wide Web and the Internet generally, this is perhaps one of the most crucial geopolitical conversations taking place today, requiring considerable diplomatic negotiations.

The loss might be in terms of the social aspects of sport—the gathering together of spectators, the journeys through cities to venues, the experience of being there. Such factors might deserve preservation were it not for the fact that the world I imagine would operate by very similar principles. Sports in digital worlds more than adequately match the immersive encounter of physical-world experiences. Indeed, they might even be more immersive. A publicity line for the new OLED television showcased at the 2013 Consumer Entertainment Show was “better than real life.” We are likely to hear that phrase again and again in the next two decades.

In regard to who will win the communication battle in sport, I noted earlier that social media and perhaps even citizen journalism do not jeopardize the foundations of the rights-paying media. Thus, one may conclude, as did Frost (2011, p. 325), that the “big players will eventually dominate on the Net” and that social media or citizen journalism will never occupy the same position as those big players. However, many new media networks can and have become big players in that world, and the big players’ social-media platforms are gatekeepers for the professional media. In that sense, the political configuration of communication has changed. Whether or not this empowers more citizens is a very different question, but conversations about the rise of the hyper-local experience are important to bear in mind. Though one may not want to hear what anyone has to say, one does want to hear one’s best friends’ experiences, and even Facebook’s Graph Search engine attempted to engage with this shift, albeit unsuccessfully. Unless the large media companies can generate this kind of personal attention, their position is not assured, at least not in the day-to-day social newsgathering that many people seek to enjoy their leisure time online and off.

A final consideration about the next stages for digital sport relates to the growing bio-digital interface, the consequences of which are likely to transform many of the debates already considered here. The implications of this fusion between biological and digital systems extend from the rise of wearable technologies, such as Google Glass, but the crucial differences here is the degree to which the technology becomes an integral part of human biology. The early indications of such interfaces can be found in advanced prosthetic devices, a symbol of which was the inclusion of Oscar Pistorius in the 2012 London Olympic Games This was the first time that a prosthetically enhanced athlete had competed alongside so-called able-bodied athletes during an Olympic Games, and his appearance was widely discussed as the rise of the bionic athlete, whose successors will challenge the status of the biologically constituted athlete. The Cyberathlon Games held in Zurich in 2016 are a further indication of this technologically enhanced future, and, as with everything else discussed in this book, the realization of such an event is heavily reliant on digital data systems.

There are good reasons to suppose that this trajectory toward bio-digital integration will continue and that athletes will make digital technology a bigger part of their biology. Indeed, prototypes are beginning to reveal how physical interfaces and sensory experiences may change, giving rise to new ways of experiencing the world. For instance, Kevin Warwick has designed chips that permit neurological exchange to take place—a kind of telepathy. The biodesigners James Auger and Jimmy Loizeau have created a telephone tooth implant that would allow people to interact with others without the need for any external interface.

If all of this seems a long way from today’s world of sport, consider how technology has already changed athletes’ biological capacities by modifying the world around them. For instance, piezoelectric dampening devices that reduce the impact of the piste on joints have been used in skiing for twenty years. Even these external technologies affect an athlete’s internal biological equilibrium. In all aspects of research into digital technology and sports, there are countless questions that have yet to be answered. Some of them require urgent monitoring. For example, how does access to digital sporting experiences occur across different demographic groups? Though a lot is made of the rising presence of women in digital gaming, is the sports genre evenly distributed? Taking into account the prominence of soccer games in major tournaments, coupled with the overwhelming presence of men’s in fantasy sports experiences (Howie and Campbell 2015), it would be premature to conclude that digital sport will be gender neutral. Alternatively, the rise of data-driven exercise raises serious questions about the management of data generated by such exercise and who will have access to it, not to mention how such activities as match fixing may operate within a world of e-sports.

Alternatively, as more of our personal histories are transformed into data, there is a growing need to advance a right to personal data ownership and, in particular, the need for a universal export of our data from one platform to another. Otherwise, the long-term positive consequences of the Big Data revolution will be swallowed up by closed, commercial systems, which will undermine our capacity to make sense of our health without paying for the privilege. While recognizing a right to own our health data is far from becoming a social reality, there is a point at which the public good associated with data should outstrip its commercial value. The demands for greater ownership and agency in our data-driven economy also resonate with the values of citizen journalism. What is at stake with the shift toward an expanded media operation at the Olympic Games is the transformations occurring in the practice of journalism, driven by the new capacities of citizens to generate their own content and curate their own stories. Equally, the move toward “backpack journalism” (Edgar 2013, p. 1208), or what Boyle (2006, p.138) earlier described as the “wireless sports journalist,” articulates the changing needs of journalists at an Olympic Games. The role of a media center is becoming less relevant as more journalists are self-contained production facilities. All they need to do their work is a electrical power supply and an Internet connection. As time goes on, accredited media at an Olympic Games are gradually blending into the crowd of citizen journalists, provoking debate about what should distinguish professional media in this new era of networked journalism. Each of these examples reveals how the sports world would be richer if it were able to adopt more citizen-led goals in its pursuit of economic sustainability. The best way to engage an audience or a readership is to make them part of the story’s creation.

The grassroots-led e-sports gaming movement is a reference point here, as an alternative model, but it also risks selling out to big sponsors along the way.¹ Moreover, there is evidence that traditional sports are beginning to appropriate e-sports; for example, in May 2016 the English football club West Ham United signed its first e-sport player. Nevertheless, consumer-driven live streaming of broadcasts may present a model that is—for the Olympic Games and other events—a more effective way of ensuring that the media contracts around such events will, as Kidd (2013) would want, make a wider contribution to advancing sport as a social movement, rather than just a series of competitions. Central to these issues is the allocation of intellectual property rights, which become increasingly compromised as data and content shift freely from one place to another in digital spaces. In the world of e-sports, this is particularly explosive, as the main sports federations have yet to consider their relationship to titles which may be framed around sports that they seek to promote and administrate (Burk 2013). In the future, one might envisage sports federations replacing disciplines from the Olympic Games with digital equivalents, but this will require organizing themselves to ensure that the e-sports gaming community don’t just turn their backs on organized sports and set up their own mega-events. After all, it doesn’t appear that e-sports will be reliant on achieving sports recognition any time soon, even if doing so would bring considerable social benefits.

Not all forms of digital innovation need erode the importance of the physical. In fact, some examples can enrich the physical world, as might be said of Nike’s Chalkbot, a robot vehicle that spray-painted yellow “graffiti” onto the route that was taken by the Tour de France riders. The graffiti consisted of messages sent by audience members using their mobile phones. Creating physical manifestations of digital messages and integrating them in the field of play was remarkable on numerous levels from the perspective of sports production, but the key message here is that creative, high-technology solutions can be delivered through simple, familiar technological means—in this case, SMS messaging. As more and more technologists become involved in the production of Sport 2.0, this is an important aspect of our future that is worth remembering, as it will ensure that digital systems improve social justice, rather than exacerbate inequalities.

Note

1. Prize money is generated by community donations. In 2014 alone, the prize money for the International DOTA 2 competition reached $10,931,103 (e-Sports Earnings 2015).