From idyllic past-time to spectacle of accelerated intensity: televisual technologies in contemporary cricket

Abstract

Shaped by the forces of globalisation, commericalisation and mediatisation, contemporary cricket has been repackaged as a media-centric “product” notable for innovative and experimental technologies. Indeed, by embracing constant technological innovation, cricket affords an accelerated culture of intensified spectacle interlaced with and interwoven by the threads of entertainment, consumerism, tourism and officiating orientations across its global telecasts. My article explores how technologies creatively manipulate and play with the spatial and aesthetic realms of cricket in non-traditional ways to recast, re-position, augment and enhance the viewing experience. Thus, cameras often oscillate between stylistic (intensified mobility), all-seeing (analytical omniscience) and participatory (pseudo-participatory) perspectives, providing a highly-mobile visual intensity through extraneous exploration, analytical complexity via hi-tech officiating tools, to the sensory invigoration of mediated athletic replication. Such permutations are extending to the digitalised, mobile and virtual formats that continue to re-shape the future mediated consumption of cricket for ephemeral and invested viewers.

Keywords:

• Television technologies
• televised sport
• point-of-view structures
• affect
• virtual representations
• commodity-spectacles

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.