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Ireland

To be fair to me, the weather was overcast today

In Rituals and Traditions today, we talked about the future of these things. How do you do that? Peer into my crystal ball, students, and see what I know, for I have thought long and hard about the hybridity of historic rituals with digital-first engagement. This is all about audience immersion, increasing fan accessibility, perhaps more personalized experiences, fancy gear and swag, and evolutions in youth sport.

Blending tech with tradition is going to be the goal in that future. This is going to further boost E-sports, more advanced virtual reality for athletes and fans. It’ll change how we experience live sport, we’ll be talking about mediated attendance which will become a ritual unto itself, and, what I’m excited about, historical reproductions. That led us to a discussion of alt-athletes, which is a term that never took off. Weekend warriors was just better alliteration, I guess. But the idea is sound. People want to play, and millennials are a huge marketplace here. The numbers I found said something like 76 percent of the people there, and much of it is about turning solo activity into team fitness and shared achievement. This looks like club teams and loose orgs, but they’ll vary with varied sports. Ultimately, this could become about finding meaning in sport and identity in exercise and recreation.

Also, you can turn that into a spectator event. In 2021 57,000 people gathered to watch the Crossfit Games. The US Open of surfing draws hundreds of thousands of spectators.

You wonder how many personal rituals are emerging in those athletes, and their fans.

We watched this documentary today in Criticism. It’s a good film, but this is the only clip they’ve put on YouTube, and it in no way explains things. Allow me.

In March 2008 — this story is getting old and I should probably take it out of rotation, but it’s good — a tornado bore down on downtown Atlanta. At the same time, the SEC basketball tournament was underway. A last second desperation shot forced overtime, and kept a bunch of people in the arena. And the arena got hit by the storm. The thought has always been that, perhaps, that shot saved a lot of people’s lives. Roll Tide. The tournament must go on, however, and there are other storms, the venue is unsafe, there are logistical considerations and there’s just a lot going on. We never think, really, when we go to a sporting event, about the hundreds and thousands of personnel hours that go into making an event happen, making it safe, making it enjoyable, and here they had to change plans mid-tournament, with the March Madness selection program just hours away.

Also, Georgia had an improbably run in that tournament. Still not sure how that happened. They weren’t good, but they played over their heads, and so the documentary is about that, too.

(My alma mater was hilariously in and out of the conference tournament in just the one game.)

And, yes, I spent part of the documentary reflexively glancing out the classroom windows. You just don’t break habits of living in places where you can get tornadoes.

I’m still living in the happy memories of our wonderful Irish vacation. So, I’m sharing extra videos that we didn’t get to at the time. It was a great vacation. I have a lot of footage. This will go on for some time. Enjoy it with me, won’t you?

Spanish Armada viewpoint.

Ireland / memories / photo / site / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
1
Apr 26

Happy April

No April fools jokes here. I’m only fooling around with the usual stuff. I cleaned up my computer. I updated my cycling spreadsheet — I need to ride more. I updated my website spreadsheet — we’re on pace for another record year. I updated some templates that serve the site.

I did some work for classes. This includes writing a lecture that is, really, a shot in the dark. Also I had to watch a documentary that we’re watching in another class. There’s also a lot of grading getting done in my online class. We’ve been reading Jenny Davis’ discussion on affordances, which means we’re about to head into the final project of the semester. It’s a busy time.

And so you make time for all of that by tearing yourself away from the fun stuff, like these guys. How can you turn away from a face as cute as this one?

Her brother, meanwhile, is clowning around in the kitchen. He’s stretching this “I’m on the mail, not on the counter” thing to the limit here. But if he’s being cute and not being a jerk he usually gets a pass.

The kitties are doing great. They are not, however, doing my work for me. We’re going to have a talk about that.

The sheep are everywhere. You can tune them out or enjoy the novelty of it. I won’t be putting a bunch of ovine videos up, but it’s tempting.

adventures / cycling / Ireland / memories / photo / Tuesday / video — Comments Off
31
Mar 26

Some days you get a lot of little in

In Rituals and Traditions we had a group work day today. At the end of the semester the groups will be delivering big presentations and I’m trying to give them some built-in time to work on their projects. They are presenting ideas to the university’s athletic department. Rituals, traditions, game day atmosphere, and so on. Today I overheard of the few ideas that are percolating. Some of them are going to shape up nicely.

In Criticism, we talked about two basketball stories that the class selected. First, we had this one, which gave us a nice modern and historical parallel.

It’s been 75 years since college basketball’s first major gambling scandal. Not all that much has changed:

Odds are, there won’t be any ads about it over the next three weeks of the NCAA Tournament, but college basketball is celebrating an anniversary this year.

It was 75 years ago that the New York district attorney announced the arrests of 32 college basketball players as part of a sweeping sting operation into point-shaving that eventually included 86 games, 17 states and $72,000 in bribes – more than $900,000 in today’s money.

[…]

Time is, in fact, a flat circle.

Three-quarters of a century later, coaches remain aggrieved that their players are equal parts coddled and entitled, and the sport is in the throes of yet another point-shaving scandal. Twenty people are alleged to have hatched a game-fixing scheme that affected 17 teams, 29 games and at least 39 players.

When these stories come up I realize I need to learn more about gambling. “Gambling: bad” only gets you so far. Also, the thing that seems obvious to me is less an issue for others. But we talked about framing and the like, which led nicely into this next story they selected.

Maryland coach Brenda Frese went viral for yelling at Oluchi Okananwa. There’s more to the story. The “more” was a delightful conversation of the function and structure of clickbait, and also curated writing.

Just yesterday we had our first outdoor ride of the season. We made it off campus in good order today and that allowed us another nice treat, an after-work ride. The days are getting longer; it’s about time.

So we pedaled by the winery, where we will soon return to eat pizza. We cruised through the pastures, where I see my horsey friends, and then turned left to go down the asphalt shoot which is some of the best roadwork around here. We went up to the park, passing empty sheep pastures, and hooked a lovely left uphill into the backside of town. We took the biggest hill around, huffing and puffing in the still-warm sun, and turned onto the road that I rode so incredibly well one time that I turned it into three Strava segments — I have never ridden it well again. Then we breezed by haunted house, down the hill, up the other side, and home.

It was a lovely, windy, 12-mile stretch of the legs.

This is Dumhach Bheag.

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27
Mar 26

Not every idea is marketable

I didn’t step outside, or even poke my head up from the computer, until the sun was going down. Meetings and emails and work and such. Here’s the view from the front porch. We face the west, but we turn wherever the best views are to be found.

A home on a lazy Susan. There’s an idea. I imagine one person standing out at the corner, squatting low, putting their back into it, slowly spinning the house. It’d be like a pushing a dead car, difficult at first, but you’d build a little momentum. The trick would be stopping at the right time. You wouldn’t want to overshoot the sunset or whatever you were aiming at.

The next trick would be managing the electrical connections. There are a lot of wires and pipes and things.

OK, so we build in some flexibility. Use that silly straw technology.

We’d need giant ball bearings. I suppose we’d need a giant ball bearing plant. The plant, itself, would need to be rather large. We’ve also got to figure out a way to transport those. That’s certainly doable, but would be costly. And replacing those, when the time comes, would be a chore.

Then you’ve got to keep leaves out of way of the things. This is starting to become a rather involved idea.

But only a few steps after we’ve invented a giant ball bearing plant.

This million dollar idea might need a little more work.

This was one of the windier places you’ll be that doesn’t involve a storm. I left in the nat sound to prove it.

That is the view from Sky Road.

Ireland / memories / Rowan / video — Comments Off
26
Mar 26

Sports and sheep

We discussed sport consumption as a ritualized practice today in Rituals and Traditions.

It is a focus on entertainment value, collective group influence, and self-enhancement, but we overlook the ritual aspects, which potentially offer individuals a chance to maintain and to celebrate cultural meanings embedded in the consumption. There is a formalism to all of this, and also symbolic performance. For example, what do you do at tailgates? We also talked about the social interactions.

Ritual, I reminded them, is a means through which individuals embody the power, authority, and value of society. And we talked about research that shows that consumers cherish ritual experiences because securing cultural sense from mass-marketed consumer goods is not straightforward. Ritual makes it real for us, basically.

We talked about “ritual specialists” which is a concept I love. These are the elders, cheerleaders, band, media, supporter groups that have socially recognized authority to judge the importance of ritual and the performance’s correctness. These are the people who can legitimize the social importance of the ritual and give us the correct way of performing it. Then I got to use one of my favorite lines. “Because this is a communication studies class I have to occasionally sneak a theory in on you.” And I talked about disposition theory — basically our enjoyment is driven by our evaluations of the characters involved. This is part of why you think the traditions you like are good and important and the stuff that other people do is dumb. (You’ve evaluated them and found them wanting.)

In Criticism we watched It’s Time. For my money, it’s one of the best bits of storytelling you can get in a sport documentary. It’s also quite intense.

The only problem with it is that the runtime takes the whole class and we’ll have to wait until next Tuesday to discuss it. That’s a long time to wait, even for such a gripping and emotional story.

We won’t talk just about the emotion, though, but also the media aesthetics, like the music and some of the shot selections, and a few of the quotes from the people that were there.

I miss the roadside sheep already.