As the digital revolution continues apace, emergent technologies and means of communication present new challenges and opportunities for the football industry. This is the first book to bring together key contemporary debates at the intersection of football studies, leisure studies, and digital cultural studies. It presents cutting edge theoretical and empirical work based around four key themes: theorizing digital football cultures; digital football fandom; football and social media; and football (sub)cybercultures. Covering topics such as transnational digital fandom, online abuse, and gender, Digital Football Cultures argues that we are witnessing the hyperdigitalization of the world’s most popular sport. This book is a valuable resource for students and researchers working in leisure studies, sports studies, football studies, and critical media studies, as well as geography, anthropology, criminology, and sociology. It is also fascinating reading for anybody working in sport, media, and culture.

Fans of specific sports teams, television series, and video games, to name a few, often create subcultures in which to discuss and celebrate their loyalty and enthusiasm for a particular object or person. Due to their strong emotional attachments, members of these fandoms are often quick to voluntarily invest their time, money, and energy into a related product or brand, thereby creating a group of faithful and passionate consumers that play a significant role in multiple domains of contemporary culture. The Handbook of Research on the Impact of Fandom in Society and Consumerism is an essential reference source that examines the cultural and economic effects of the fandom phenomenon through a multidisciplinary lens and shapes an understanding of the impact of fandom on brand building. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics such as religiosity, cosplay, and event marketing, this publication is ideally designed for marketers, managers, advertisers, brand managers, consumer behavior analysts, product developers, psychologists, entertainment managers, event coordinators, political scientists, anthropologists, academicians, researchers, and students seeking current studies on the global impact of this particularly devoted community.

Live broadband streaming of the 2008 Beijing Olympics accounted for 2,200 of the estimated 3,600 total hours shown by the American NBC-Universal networks. At the 2012 London Olympics, unprecedented multi-platforming embraced online, mobile devices, game consoles and broadcast television, with the BBC providing 2,500 hours of live coverage, including every competitive event, much in high definition and some in 3D. The BBC also had 12 million requests for video on mobile phones and 9.2 million browsers on its mobile Olympics website and app. This pattern will only intensify at future sport mega events like the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics, both of which will take place in Brazil. Increasingly, when people talk of the screen that delivers footage of their favorite professional sport, they are describing desktop, laptop, and tablet computer screens as well as television and mobile handsets. Digital Media Sport analyzes the intersecting issues of technological change, market power, and cultural practices that shape the contemporary global sports media landscape. The complexity of these related issues demands an interdisciplinary approach that is adopted here in a series of thematically-organized essays by international scholars working in media studies, Internet studies, sociology, cultural studies, and sport studies. .

The digital turn in leisure has opened up a vast array of new opportunities to play, learn, participate and be entertained – opportunities that have transformed what we recognise as leisure. This edited collection provides a significant contribution to our changing understanding of digital leisure cultures, reflecting on the socio-historical context within which the digital age emerged, while engaging with new debates about the evolving and controversial role of digital platforms in contemporary leisure cultures. This book also demonstrates the interdisciplinary nature of studying digital leisure cultures. To make sense of how individuals and institutions use digital spaces it is necessary to draw on history, science and technology, philosophy, cultural studies, sociology and geography, as well as sport and leisure studies. This important and timely study discusses both the promise of the digital sphere as a realm of liberation, and the darker side of the internet associated with control, surveillance, exclusion and dehumanisation. Digital Leisure Cultures: Critical perspectives is fascinating reading for any student or scholar of sociology, sport and leisure studies, geography or media studies.

In recent decades, Korean communication and media have substantially grown to become some of the most significant segments of Korean society. Since the early 1990s, Korea has experienced several distinctive changes in its politics, economy, and technology, which are directly related to the development of local media and culture. Korea has greatly developed several cutting-edge technologies, such as smartphones, video games, and mobile instant messengers to become the most networked society throughout the world. As the Korean Wave exemplifies, the once small and peripheral Korea has also created several unique local popular cultures, including television programs, movies, and popular music, known as K-pop, and these products have penetrated many parts of the world. As Korean media and popular culture have rapidly grown, the number of media scholars and topics covering these areas in academic discourses has increased. These scholars’ interests have expanded from traditional media, such as Korean journalism and cinema, to several new cutting-edge areas, like digital technologies, health communication, and LGBT-related issues. In celebrating the Korean American Communication Association’s fortieth anniversary in 2018, this book documents and historicizes the growth of growing scholarship in the realm of Korean media and communication.

This first book in the Journalism Insights series examines the major practical and ethical challenges confronting contemporary sports journalists which have emerged from, or been exacerbated by, the use of digital and social media. Combining both quantitative and qualitative research and contributions from industry experts in sports reporting across Europe, America and Australia, the collection offers a valuable look at the digital sports reporting industry today. Issues discussed in the text include the ethical questions created by social media abuse received by sports journalists, the impact of social media on narratives about gender and race, and the ‘silencing’ of journalists over the issue of trans athletes, as well as the impact on ‘traditional’ aspects of sports journalism, such as the match report. The book features first-hand accounts from leading sports reporters and scholars about how these changes have affected the industry and sets out what ‘best practice’ looks like in this field today. This book will be a useful resource for scholars and students working in the fields of journalism, media, sports and communication, as well as for current sports journalism practitioners interested in the future of a changing industry.

This book examines the complex network of influences that collide in the culture of digital fighting games. Players from all over the world engage in competitive combat with one another, forming communities in both real and virtual spaces, attending tournaments and battling online via internet-connected home game consoles. But what is the logic behind their shared playstyle and culture? What are the threads that tie them together, and how does this inform our understanding of competitive gaming, community, and identity? Informed by observations made at one of the biggest fighting game events in the world – the Evolution Series tournament, or "EVO" – and interviews with fighting game players themselves, this book covers everything from the influence of arcade spaces, to the place of gender and ethnicity in the community, to the clash of philosophies over how these games should be played in the first place. In the process, it establishes the role of technology, gameplay, and community in how these players define both themselves and the games that they play.