COURSE STRUCTURE
Module 1 Topic D: Discussion Questions
Following the lecture, and having read the assigned readings and watch relevant video clips, you are expected to prepare answers for TWO (those questions in green) of the following discussion questions. Your prepared answers will form the basis of your verbal contributions within discussion sections
These answers should:
1. Be a minimum of 150 words for each answer (not including the question or reference list).
2. Be typed and double-spaced.
3. Have the complete question immediately prior to the answer.
4. Cite appropriately any sources used in your answer (use appropriate Style and Format Guidelines).
5. Include a complete reference list (use appropriate Style and Format Guidelines).
6. Hand in a hard copy of answers during discussion section
The aim of these answers is to get you to engage and extend the information covered within each theme, in order to generate a better understanding of core concepts, knowledge, and issues.
These questions are intended as preparation for both the discussion section and exam related to this topic.
PLEASE NOTE: Within the multiple choice section of the module exam, you should expect to be asked questions on the information related to any of these questions.
However, the ONE thematic essay question for the module exam will be selected from those questions in green.
Following the review session for this module the selected question will be designated in red.
Theme 1: Society of the Mediated Spectacle
1. Describe the two meanings of culture and how they are interrelated. What role has technology played in the change speed and reach of cultural communication? What type of media culture do we live in today?
2. Through reference to sport culture, outline the integrated/intertextual elements of Debord’s notion of the society of the spectacle. In what way are they integrated and intertextual?
3. In what ways are our individual lives influenced by the integrated/intertextual sport spectacle? Provide specific examples related to your own understanding, experience, and identity.
Theme 2: The Politics of the Sportainment Spectacle
1. To what extent, and in what ways, do you consider major established sporting events (i.e. the Super Bowl, World Series, NBA play-offs, Stanley Cup Final) to have been manufactured as forms of sportainment? Be specific in your examples.
2. Outline the differences between the social welfare and neoliberal the mass communications systems. What are the relative benefits and/or disadvantages of one media system over the other? Has sport been benefited or disadvantaged from the emergence of a neoliberal mass communications industry?
3. To what extent, and in what ways are sport media spectacles hyperreal? What hegemonic neoliberal values/codes, and forms of citizenship, are reinforced through sportainment spectacles such as The Biggest Loser (Plymire, 2012), and how are they linked to contemporary bio-politics?
Theme 3: The Hyperreality of the Sportainment Spectacle
1. What is hyperreality, and in what ways could contemporary society be considered to be hyperreal? Using Baudrillard’s conceptualizing, how would you describe NBC Olympic broadcasts as being hyperreal?
2. What economic factors necessitate NBC's manufacture of the Olympic Games as a hyperreal "family" spectacle?
3. Outline examples of how specific mediated codes are reproduced within and through hyperreal simulations of reality. How have such hyperreal simulations influenced your own understanding of race/ethnic, sexual, gender, class, [dis]ability, and national codes?
Theme 4: Manufacturing Olympic Hyperreality
1. How is the construction and success of a hyperreal “soap opera games” (Carlson, 1996) dependent on NBC’s interrelated manipulation of time and audience emotion? Provide examples of this production strategy from a sportainment spectacle you have watched recently.
2. What are the dominant ideological codes/mainstream values which have shaped recent NBC Olympic coverage. Give examples of these drawn from NBC’s construction of athlete identities during the 2014 Sochi Olympic opening ceremony (see related video clips on the narrativizing of Bode Miller and Nicole Pikus-Pace).
3. How does NBC’s primetime coverage of the Olympic Games reproduce and reinforce mainstream American views and values? Could the hyperreal simulations of reality manufactured by this form of commercial programming be considered political in any way? If so, how?
Theme 5: Sportainment Spectacles, Popular Physical Inertia, and Public Health
1. What are the three levels of sportainment. How do they differ? Do you find sportainment spectacles in any way an inspiration to becoming more active? Have you noticed any evidence of this, or the contrary, over the course of your life?
2. In what ways do you consider hyperreal sportainment spectacles to be related to public health, physical activity, and/or obesity? Do they inspire physical activity or contribute to its decline?
