Abstract
The NBA has become a global mega-sport with fans turning in, in their millions to follow the world’s best basketball players. The sport has enjoyed significant cultural legitimacy and financial spoils, helped along by its aggressive broadcast strategy. Through player rivalries, the sport has grown beyond the television set to become a multi-billion dollar industry with shoes and fashion driving street culture around the world. However, it was not always the case. The chapter tracks the sociology of the NBA’s rise through media sport lenses, understanding the influence of the wider entertainment industries, television, and social media. Ultimately it seeks to understand how the NBA used and continues to adapt to different communication technologies and other societal challenges to meet the future needs for media-driven financialization.
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Notes
- 1.
“metaverse, proposed network of immersive online worlds experienced typically through virtual reality or augmented reality in which users would interact with each other and purchase goods and services, some of which would exist only in the online world.” https://www.britannica.com/topic/metaverse
- 2.
“NFT stands for ‘non-fungible token’. Non-fungible means that something is unique and can’t be replaced. By contrast, physical money and cryptocurrencies are fungible, which means they can be traded or exchanged for one another. Every NFT contains a digital signature which makes each one unique. NFTs are digital assets and could be photos, videos, audio files, or another digital format. NFT examples include artwork, comic books, sports collectibles, trading cards, games and more” (https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/what-is-an-nft).
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Tickell, S. (2024). A Sociological View of the NBA and How Aggressive Media and Culture Strategies Drove the Rise of a Mega Sport. In: Neuhaus, T., Thomas, N. (eds) Interdisciplinary Analyses of Professional Basketball. Global Culture and Sport Series. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41656-9_12
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