Handbook on Sport and Culture: Q&A with Katerina Girginova

Our relationship with sports is changing. Now, with extended reality (XR) technology, we can watch live sporting events from the sidelines without ever leaving the couch, experience a bike ride through the French Alps with professional cyclists, and even see ourselves run up and down the court in an NBA game. 

This is one of the developments in our experience of sports that a new handbook, titled “Handbook on Sport and Culture,” looks at in order to examine the relationship between culture and sports. The contributors’ perspectives span cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, marketing, management and psychology in order to systematically analyze the culture-sport nexus. 

Co-editor Katerina Girginova’s chapter, “Extended reality cultures in sport,” explores how innovations in extended reality technology have impacted our understandings of space, time, and physical interactions in order to form new cultural meanings and practices as consumers of sports.

We recently spoke with Girginova, Research Director of the Annenberg Extended Reality Lab and Editor of the Social Grammars of Virtuality, about XR technology and the "sportification of culture.” 

How is extended reality technology shaping our relationship to sports as consumers? 

Extended reality (XR) technologies include everything from virtual reality tools to AI-enabled augmented reality glasses, e-sports and digital twins of people, sporting venues, and whole cities. In short, these technologies are making consumer experiences increasingly spatial, interactive, and physical (SIP). It is the combination of these three fundamental characteristics that distinguishes XR media from other media forms, and offers novel opportunities and challenges for consumers, creators, researchers and policymakers alike.

Do you view these technologies as a positive or negative addition to our experience?

I view them as the future of our media industry that needs thoughtful guidance right now. I believe most people want to get closer to the mediated content or person they love, which is why XR technologies are so exciting — they can help to bridge physical and psychological distance. However, that shouldn’t come at the expense of privacy, security, or ethical content creation and user practices.

Is this technology here to stay? What can we expect from future developments?

Yes. While the specific technologies and hardware will change, our media landscape has already become more SIP. Whether we call these technologies ‘XR,’ ‘spatial computing,’ or simply ‘immersive,’ we are seeing their rapid adoption beyond sport: in museums, health care, media and entertainment, architecture and engineering, security and defense, etc. We are also seeing a greater industry push toward wearables. That includes everything from fitness rings that track a growing range of personal biometric data, to Amazon creating ‘smart glasses’ for their delivery drivers, and XR and AI enabled contact lenses (which, thankfully, are still a while away from being released!). I don’t believe we will go back from S.I.P. media and technologies, so the question becomes how to best use, create and manage them.

The Handbook, which you’ve co-edited, looks at various connections between culture and sports. What are some other facets of the culture-sport connection that interest you? 

In addition to exploring how sport serves as a breeding ground for various socio-cultural and technological innovations, I’m interested in the concept of the ‘sportification of culture.’ That is, how sport culture, writ broadly, seeps its way into daily life, specifically for those who do not consider themselves avid sports fans. There are many contemporary examples, but one interesting historical example that we can draw lessons from is in the culturally-varied ways sport is introduced through the educational system to children at a young age. In many Western countries, sport is seen as a game, and as something to be divorced from intellectual thought (gaming and e-sports suffer a similar fate, despite the huge prominence of game engines as technological infrastructure for numerous applications beyond gaming and despite the proven efficacy of gamification for learning, for example). Even the word ‘sport’ used to be a derogatory term, hence, the continuation of the Cartesian divide. On the flip side, in many Eastern European and Scandinavian countries, sport has historically been seen as a key part of human culture that has been shaped by intellectuals and promoted as fundamental for mental development alongside language arts, music and others.

Of course, these cultural dynamics are very nuanced, but since sport is intimately connected to the human body, it becomes a particularly interesting context for examining XR technologies and practices as they are the most physical media form we’ve had to date.

You're co-founder and co-director of the Annenberg Extended Reality Lab. Could you share some of the work you and your colleagues are doing and the insights that have come out of the lab?

We are particularly interested in augmented reality or ‘AR’ media and user practices because from the modern spectrum of XR technologies, that is what most people use on a daily basis. By many estimates, over a billion people use some form of augmented reality technology on their phones daily, without necessarily calling it by that name. We’ve already worked on a series of grants that designed and examined how AR content can be co-created with local communities (one example here) to leverage its location-based affordances and we are now looking to expand this work to better understand the specifics of how the augmented reality content experience compares to regular, web-based content from a user perspective.

We are also starting some more explorations around digital twins, which in our case refers to the virtual replicas of places and people. This fittingly brings us back to sport, because the context we are examining is the Olympic Games, which as of last year, has an official partner to create digital twins of the cities in which they host the Games. The 2024 Olympics in Paris were a good test run for the technology, and we are now looking to see how its scope and use will expand with LA’s 2028 Olympics.