3pm Journal of Digital research & publishing - artichoke web design

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