3PMjournal_2010s2

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3pm Journal of Digital Research & Publishing Social Media and Rugby: A Game of Inches Tiffanny Junee UNIVERSITY OF SYDNEY Abstract Australians are active consumers and participants of organized sports and media. As a recent Nielsen study showed, they are also some of the most engaged users of social media in the world. After only six years, social media has already had a profound role in (re)shaping corporate and social communications practices. This paper investigates how social media has (re)shaped the social dynamics and identity of professional rugby union players, administrators and rugby fan communications in Australia. Not surprisingly, social media has affected both individual and corporate agency within the rugby community raising questions about how and where it is possible for individuals to act independently within rugby communities both on- and off-line. This essay draws on selected examples of online corporate, player and fan texts to question how social media is being used (and possibly abused) by members of the elite rugby community in maintaining and creating agency. Keywords Rugby union, social media, football, fandom, engaged communities, corporate communications Introduction Organized sports carry their own set of cultural symbols, social constructs, language and values system. In Australia, football has dominated mainstream leisure consumption and its relationship with the media (Cashman 2005). While Rugby Union has traditionally been considered the preserve of middle-class white Australia - entrenched in the elite private school system - Rugby League has been its working-class, hybrid cousin, played and promoted within the public school system (Phillips 1994). Soccer, although now the largest participation code of football in Australia across both sexes and age groups, has traditionally had its home within ethnic social and media communities; while AFL, up until 15 – 20 years ago, was largely confined (by practice or by choice) to the southern state 47
3pm Journal of Digital Research & Publishing of Victoria (and immediate surrounds) and not surprisingly, considered and promoted within the media as Victorian Football. Traditionally, Australians are active consumers and participants of organized sports such as rugby union (Bloomfield 2003), a football code that has enjoyed a unique relationship with print and electronic media in Australia (Rowe 2007). According to a recent Nielsen study, Australians are also the most engaged users of social media in the world 1 . The purpose of this paper is to understand how this unique relationship has evolved to include digital (or ‘new’) media and its impact on communications within the elite rugby community. Accordingly, this paper will look at consumption 2 of social media by members of key rugby community sub-groups: professional rugby union players, administrators, rugby media and rugby fans and analyze the impact of these communications on agency. As a study of current online behavior within the rugby community it will also comprise a theoretical and textual analysis of selected online social media corporate, player and fan texts 3 , posing the question: how is social media being used (and possibly abused) by members of the elite rugby community in maintaining and creating agency 4 ? Agency underlies this investigation with the purpose of the article to show how and where agency is possible within existing structures within rugby communities – both on and off-line. Sport + Media = Entertainment The history of media entertainment has increasingly come to incorporate the history of sport (Briggs and Burke 2005). When the Commodore 64 computer became a mass-market consumer good in the late 1970s, technologists said it was destined to change the way we communicated. It didn’t; primarily because the home computer was a standalone machine with no network facility 5 yet available. However, its mere presence premised a change in 1 Nielsenwire (January 2010) found Australians spend the highest average time (7+ hours per week) directly engaged with social networking sites. http://blog.nielsen.com/ nielsenwire/global/led-by-facebook-twitter-global-time-spent-on-social-media-sites-up-82-yearover-year/ [accessed: 16 October 2010] 2 The author will situate analysis within the context of Consumer Culture Theory’s understanding of cultural meanings via socio-historic influences in shaping social dynamics and identity within everyday contexts as prescribed by Arnould and Thompson (2005). 3 For an in-depth discussion of the cultural significance of fan texts see Henry Jenkins (1992), Textual Poachers and his five key features of ‘fandom’. 4 Agency is defined, for the purposes of this article, as the capacity of the individual to act independently. 5 Barry Wellman (2001), Computer Networks as Social Networks for a discussion on the ability of the internet (as a computer network) in increasing a person’s social capital. 48
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