The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture Audiobook (Free)

In an increasingly secular, fragmented, and distracted culture, nothing brings Americans together that can compare with sports. On Sundays in Sept, more households worship on the altar of the NFL than at any church. This appeal, which slashes across all demographic and ideological lines, makes sports possibly the last unifying mass ritual of our period, with huge numbers of people all focused on the same thing at the same minute. That timeless, live quality makes sports activities very powerful, and incredibly profitable. And about The Power of Sports activities: Mass media and Spectacle in American Lifestyle the press spectacle around them is getting larger, brighter, and noisier.

More importantly, sports activities are sold as an oasis of community to a nation deeply divided: They are escapist, apolitical, the just link that binds. In fact, precisely because they appear allegedly ‘above politics,’ sports activities have the ability to smuggle powerful text messages about inequality, patriotism, labor, and race to massive audiences. And as the wider lifestyle works through moving gender roles and masculine power, those anxieties are also found in the encounters of female sports journalists, athletes, and followers, and through the insurance coverage of assault by and against male systems. Sports, rather than being the thing everyone can agree on, flawlessly encapsulate the roiling tensions of contemporary American life.