Changes and Violence in Sport as a Result of Media Technology: Loss of a Common World, and the Role of the Public Realm

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to attempt a reflection on the relationship between the mediatization/technologization of sports and violence.

The emergence of sport in the modern era was accompanied by a union between “suppression of violence” and “viewing enjoyment”; however, media technology, which has sought to impose rigor in sporting decisions, has led the public to realize that, as typified by decisions by video assistant referees (VAR), truth can be verified by machines but cannot be captured by the human senses.

Yet, according to Arendt, people’s humanistic activity is neither the “production” that creates technology nor the “labor” (industry) that is accelerating the technologization process. “Labor” is an activity that is necessary to live, and in today’s world, “production” has also been subsumed in that “labor.” In public spaces, which are free from such necessity, human beings are recognized by others, and acquire reality as existence, through sensus communis of the body, by means of “actions” (exchanging words, etc.) performed in places of direct exchange (the common world) involving multiple people.

Viewed in this way, the mediatization/technologization of sport is inherently “violent” in that it reduces the sensus communis of the body into “vision” and deprives people of the “power” to form the common world and public space. What is important in modern sport, where the progress of technologization is inevitable, are direct places of exchange involving multiple persons (public spaces), such as the social intercourse and general meetings seen in the context of sports clubs, as well as the power to create such spaces.