Introduction : sport in the network society and why it matters

In the early years of the twenty-first century, the long-heralded digital transformation of mediated sport announced its arrival with a force that could no longer be ignored. Newspapers, which had literally marked their readers with ink since the first sport reports more than 300 years earlier, suddenly began to lose them to the much cleaner, more flexible combination of keyboard and computer screen . Analogue radio and television, which had provided sport sound and vision for decades, were given firm notice that their wave-based broadcasts were ultimately to be switched off and replaced by the multiplying binary splits of digital signals. The digital regime rapidly proliferated across mobile telephony and gaming, while computer-based desktop, laptop, notebook and tablet devices created an expanding array of uses and connections that steadily eroded the divide between "old" and "new" sport media, providing many new forms of mediated sport text and ways of accessing them.