Mobile media sport: the case for building a mobile media and communications research agenda

Media sport researchers are frequently neglecting to analyse the rise, effects, and meanings of mobile media and communications. This situation is partly explained by the fact mobile media encompass practices, technologies, and markets that are grounded historically in the telecommunications and information technology industries, which sit apart from the broadcast (radio and television) and print (newspapers and magazines) media that dominated the transmission, circulation, and representation of professional sport for over a century. It is now time to build a research agenda dedicated to the study of mobile media and communications, especially given the proliferation of mobile digital computing and mobile Internet. Three reasons are presented in support of this argument. First, mobile media and telecommunications introduce stories into the history of media sport that need to be recognised if its contemporary features are to be properly contextualised and understood. Second, these stories are linked to an expanded range of meanings, technologies, and infrastructures captured by the term media that must now be accounted for. Third, mobile media reveal accelerating forms of hyper-commodification that are locking media sport into privately controlled market frameworks. A mobile research agenda also offers the potential for media sport scholarship to make a sustained contribution to the study of mediatisation processes, as well as mobile media and communications studies.