| Sumario: | Technology has re-defined fantasy football as a mediated participatory culture fueled by three foundational concepts: community, information, and surveillance. This article explores how technology has shifted the focus of fantasy football participation from its origins in community to an obsession with competition driven by capital and a desire for supremacy. The Internet affords a symbolic construction of community that involves public discussion, human interaction, and relationships, and fantasy football communities were some of the first to navigate this space. The merger of virtual solidarity and real football allows us to understand these spaces as mediated and negotiated fantasy communities of practice. The technical expansion and creation of mediated information constructs an implicit bridge between the fantasy realm and the everyday through participation that shifts from the original social aspect afforded by community to improving self-esteem through fantasy achievement. This constant form of engagement results in media-system dependency that fuels the economic engine of media corporations who are competing for an audience. We view the issue of surveillance through panoptic and synoptic lenses to examine the constructed space of community and mediated information. Specifically, how information is accessed and shared raises questions about surveillance and the dynamics of power produced by and through fantasy football where curating information through virtual enclosures represents a power function in a new platform that exists in the chaos of the Internet where information is growing exponentially. Participants are often drawn to fantasy football for the communal pleasure that it offers, but deeper involvement can lead to a desire for domination. Therefore, fantasy football is now a participatory culture moderated through communities of practice, controlled by mediated information, and monitored through surveillance, both within and across respective communities, as well as by media entities in search of new forms of revenue.
|
|---|