Michael Serazio is a professor of communication at Boston College who studies media production, advertising, popular culture, political communication and new media. He has published in the Journal of Communication, the Journal of Consumer Culture, and Media, Culture & Society, among other scholarly venues, and has authored The Authenticity Industries: Keeping it ‘Real’ in Media, Culture, and Politics (Stanford University Press, 2023), The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture (NYU Press, 2019) and Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing (NYU Press, 2013). A former journalist, he has also written essays for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and other publications. In this interview, we discuss The Power of Sports and the production and consumption of sports through the media.
Greg: What inspired you to write a book about the cultural production of sports?
Michael: Sports are one of the most powerful cultural practices that we have—indeed, in the book, I argue that they fill the vacuum of religious decline. But they’re also a massive industry and a media spectacle like no other. That means that, behind-the-scenes, a host of folks in journalism and business are working to put that show on. I wanted to show both those dimensions: how sports reflect America and how they are created for us.
Greg: Are sports a means of transmitting almost any message, or are there certain messages inherent to the spectacle of sports?
Michael: I suppose in theory sports could transmit about any message but there are some narratives and mythologies that we tend to hear more than others. One of the main ones that I try to deconstruct in the book is that sports teach us the world is a meritocracy: that you succeed by hard work alone. It’s not that you don’t need hard work to succeed in sports or in life, but there’s also a lot of luck (good and bad). Rarely, though, does that message come through—and certainly not by the victors.
Greg: You said that sports teach us that the world is a meritocracy and discount the impact of luck. How should sports fans assess the relative impacts of hard work, talent, luck and other factors, and how should we apply that assessment to our own lives?
Michael: Truth be told, success attribution in sports is always and forever correlational rather than causational. It could be hard work that wins you the championship; it could be luck; it could be some other factor. We can’t really know, but we’ll forever make arguments about that. In terms of how those narratives apply to our own lives, I find that humility is always a safe way to go. Work hard, try to achieve success as best as possible and, if it arrives, try to remember that luck may well have played a part in that good fortune.
Greg: Do the messages vary from one sport to another?
Michael: They can, but in the case of the meritocracy myth, that’s pretty consistent across both team and individual sports and those that are super popular and widespread and those that are less so.
Greg: How do you see the production and consumption of sports changing in the future?
Michael: It’s certainly already changing dramatically. The biggest shift that we’re in the midst of has to do with the delivery of sports content—the old cable model is falling apart in slow motion (though that may speed up) and the new digital/streaming structure is being built in its place. Obviously, too, social media has an enormous impact on the production and consumption of sports.
Greg: Do you think the new digital/streaming/social media delivery of sports will change the key messages of sports? Or will we see the same messages in new packaging?
Michael: In terms of those dominant narratives, I think the messages will probably remain timeless. But thanks to digital/social, you’ll have new voices (including athletes themselves) vocalizing them for audiences.
Greg: What most surprised you as you were researching and writing this book?
Michael: Interesting question—I suppose the rise of data’s centrality within sports culture. Whether it’s fantasy sports or the cult of general manager or the interesting new biometric measurements of players, the importance of turning the beauty of play into quantifiable, comparable content is something I didn’t expect to find. And that, especially with the rise of sports gambling, will only get bigger, I suspect.
Check out Michael Serazio’s book The Power of Sports to learn more about the production and consumption of sports through the media. And for more interviews like this one, visit The KineSophy Library.