[MUSIC] This time I wanna think with you about the phenomenon of the fan. Namely why it is that so many hundreds of millions of us probably billions, at this point, around the world spend so much time watching sports on tv, streaming sports on the internet, going to games, following our favorite teams and players. And to begin to think about this question I wanna introduce the concept of what can be called the great transformation. The great transformation is something that happens in the nature and the relationship of sports and spectatorship. Over the last century. A hundred years ago, sports were already a big deal. But the majority of people spent the majority of their time playing sports not watching sports and being fans. Remember this is an age of before television, way before television. When the radio is just beginning. When really only the big mass media is newspapers and people really don't have the option to watch games on any form of media. They can go to the stadium, but that's their only option for being a fan. And so, proportion wise sports and the time that's getting spent on them really is revolving more around playing, participating then sitting on the couch and staring at the television. Now over the last century this relationship has flipped and we still spend tons of time around the world playing sports but we spend even more time watching them now. I am always struck by students here at Duke, and whom many are very athletic and play intramural on varsity sports. A lot of them say, at least the ones who aren't on varsity teams, say well, yeah I play a lot of sports, but I spend even more time like following scores and gonna games and doing the whole fantasy fan thing on the internet. So this is the great transformation, it's the growth of spectatorship and fandom into this gigantic global phenomenon. Lewis Mumford, who is this interesting social critic in the early 20th Century already wrote in 1934 that following sports, being sports had become what he called a duty of the machine age. This thing almost that we love, but especially men that we feel obligated to do. A really big part of our lives. Now, the midwife of this so called great transformation, the growth of sports fandom into a gigantic phenomenon is very obviously technology and in particular communications technology. As radio develops and then, especially, television in the 1960s and 70s, followed in the 80s and the 90s up to the present by the Internet. These communications technologies bring sports to every corner of the world and make it possible to engage in our passion addiction for sports at any time of day. So you can do sports now anywhere, any time. When I go to do research in a little Andean village in Peru where I've been going for 30 years, I can now watch over the Internet. I can stream a New York Yankees or an Oakland A's baseball game if I want. So you can watch sports anywhere. You can also now watch sports anytime. If I can't sleep some night, I wake up at 3:30 AM worrying about this or that as we sometimes do, I can turn on a game. I can get a cricket game from India or watch a soccer game that's being played in Russia or whatever sports 24/7 everywhere around the world. And this phenomenon of what could be called sports creep, the massification of sports and their availability. All around the world at any time is really a relatively recent invention of the last forty or fifty years. It takes television first for this to become possible. But in the early age of television and sports in the 1960s and the early 1970s, you still didn't have all that big access to watching games. So I can remember back when I was a little kid in the 1960s and I was already really into sports that the only thing that you could watch on TV was, that I remember anyway. Was the Saturday game of the week. I think it was on NBC. It was a baseball game. We still had a black and white tv in those days of the dinosaur, and that was it. If you wanted to watch baseball, you watched it on Saturday. And they had football games, I believe, NFL games on Sunday and maybe a basketball game on Sunday. It was only on the weekends and it was only once a week. And it was the same way when I was a kid in the early 1970s in Italy. There if you wanted to watch sports during the week forget about it. The only time that you could watch sports was on Sunday afternoon, because that's when the Italian City League soccer games were happening. So all of this begins to change in 1970. You can fix it at a particular date. That's when Monday Night Football is invented in the United States. And these TV producers have what was then a kinda wild original idea. Hey, what would happen if we showed a football game during the week and in Prime Time in the evening, not in the middle of the day? Wouldn't that be a radical idea. Well, they did it and Monday Night Football took off. There was a huge appetite for that. And 30, 40 years later you have Thursday Night Football and you had football on Saturday and you had football on Sunday and you had football highlights shows and talk shows all through during the week. So 1970 Monday night football and then in 1979 ESPN another landmark in the story of the great transformation of sports creep of the massive occasion of sports. ESPN as the idea hey, we cannot only show some games during the week, as Monday night football is pioneering, we can have a 24/7 sports channel so you can watch something related to sports every day of the week at any time of the day. So, that's where we have gotten to now, and it's only accelerated thru the internet, sports anytime, anywhere. And the question then becomes, okay, communications technology has enabled the blowing up the gigantification of sports fandom. But why sports? Why is it that so many of us seem to care so much about sports to spend so much of our time watching sports? Now I probably spend at least three or four hours of week and at times in my life I would spend more than that watching sports on TV. Why sports? After all, in this entertainment saturated society, we could be watching any other kinda junky stuff or whatever drama you would be streaming, Netflix movies or many of us are doing that. There's a zillion and one different options. So, why sports? Why is is that sports seem to have this hold over the imagination of a certain pretty big sector of the global population. And that's the question why sports, why sports fandom, that I wanna turn to in the second part of the lecture. [MUSIC]
