Smash and Bash Cricket? Affective Technological Innovations in the Big Bash

Abstract

With an explicit focus on the Australia's KFC T20 Big Bash League, my article explores how cricket is packaged as an affective televisual spectacle. The Big Bash's technological innovations and refinements blur the lines of information, entertainment and commodification, while allowing a traditional broadcast media form to be re-presented in non-traditional ways. That is, cameras and other technologies operate in fluid and highlymobile ways, encroach upon or are embedded within the field of play, and more frequently are placed on players and officials during live sporting contests. In turn, these contrasting technologies and multiple perspectives simultaneously provide affective layers for viewer engagement, merging analytical tools for sporting knowledge, sites for commodification and through mediated athletic replication. These technologies and techniques arguably afford an affective televisual "smash and bash" spectacle for both ephemeral and invested viewers. Sport as Media? Television, Technological Innovation and the Mediatisation of SportBrett Hutchins and David Rowe (2012) have observed a substantial shift in traditional broadcast models of scarcity to forms of digital plenitude, with contemporary sport mediation being radically transformed by these associated accelerated practices. Indeed, a myriad of sophisticated digital tools, techniques and devices are capturing, supplementing, shaping and disseminating sports content. As such, Hutchins and Rowe (2012: 10) assert that the sport and media binary should be re-thought as 'sport as media' given the intensification of these technologies, their enhanced interactive capacities and their increased hybridity, fluidity and materiality. Moreover, continual remediation cyclically impinges upon constructions of the spectacle, "real" sporting practices and advancements to technology, while increased global and commercial pressures further complicate the entangled web of sport mediatisation

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