Writing from an autoethnographic perspective, this article explores male leisure practices via the mediated relationships fans enter into with stars. More specifically, my own fandom for Formula One driver Jacques Villeneuve is the locus of study, revealing how this affective investment shapes and furnishes my corresponding leisure practices. Notions of gendered 'performativity' come to the fore, with my own displays evoking, enacting and revealing oscillating performances of masculinity. Moreover, there are interesting gendered dynamics that such fan leisure practices flag in terms of the intersection of female/male relationships and the potential 'fantasy' and/or narcissistic readings that a male fan identifying with and performing as another male sport star afford. Finally, my research reveals paradoxes for contemporary masculinities, with fans reliant upon mediation and commodification to facilitate and sustain their performative roles.

With an explicit focus on the Australia's KFC T20 Big Bash League, my article explores how cricket is packaged as an affective televisual spectacle. The Big Bash's technological innovations and refinements blur the lines of information, entertainment and commodification, while allowing a traditional broadcast media form to be re-presented in non-traditional ways. That is, cameras and other technologies operate in fluid and highlymobile ways, encroach upon or are embedded within the field of play, and more frequently are placed on players and officials during live sporting contests. In turn, these contrasting technologies and multiple perspectives simultaneously provide affective layers for viewer engagement, merging analytical tools for sporting knowledge, sites for commodification and through mediated athletic replication. These technologies and techniques arguably afford an affective televisual "smash and bash" spectacle for both ephemeral and invested viewers. Sport as Media? Television, Technological Innovation and the Mediatisation of SportBrett Hutchins and David Rowe (2012) have observed a substantial shift in traditional broadcast models of scarcity to forms of digital plenitude, with contemporary sport mediation being radically transformed by these associated accelerated practices. Indeed, a myriad of sophisticated digital tools, techniques and devices are capturing, supplementing, shaping and disseminating sports content. As such, Hutchins and Rowe (2012: 10) assert that the sport and media binary should be re-thought as 'sport as media' given the intensification of these technologies, their enhanced interactive capacities and their increased hybridity, fluidity and materiality. Moreover, continual remediation cyclically impinges upon constructions of the spectacle, "real" sporting practices and advancements to technology, while increased global and commercial pressures further complicate the entangled web of sport mediatisation

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Recently, several researchers have highlighted the difficulty with the binary terms “insider–outsider” within qualitative research. We similarly critique the insider/outsider binary in this article, but offer an alternative by utilizing Bourdieu’s theoretical concepts of capital, habitus, and field to compare two researcher’s ethnographic accounts of researching sports facilities in New Zealand. One of the ethnographers, D.S., describes himself as closer to an outsider than an insider in the context of the velodrome he was examining, while R.K. describes herself as an insider in the field of gymnastics. Through comparing their accounts, we show how the language of insider/outsider can be limiting. Instead, we argue that Bourdieu’s framework provides a more nuanced account of researcher positionality that moves beyond the insider/outsider binary, while affording insights into the reflexive and fluid researcher performances that shape the ethnographically researched field.

Media technologies and digital practices are reshaping and redefining the future of sport fandom. This article points to some of the utopian and dystopic transformations for fandom presented by (post)television, digital/social media and the anticipated virtual technologies of the future. Specifically, three distinct phases of fan participation are charted around existing and futuristic visions of technology-as-sport. First are the current televisual technologies that attempt to engage and retain traditionally “passive” viewers as spectators through pseudo-participatory perspectives that will carry over to new screens and technologies. Second, the assumed interactive participation afforded by social and digital media is considered, positing the future amplification of connectivity, personalisation and networking across digital fan communities, albeit undercut by further impositions of corporatisation and datafication through illusory forms of “interactivity”. Finally, the fusion, intensification and continual evolution of technology-as-sport is explored, asserting that forms of immersive participation will be significant for future virtual technologies and may ultimately re-position fans as e-participants in their own media-tech sport spectacles. Collectively, it is anticipated that the creation of new virtual worlds, spaces and experiences will amplify and operationalise forms of immersive participation around augmented spectatorship, virtual athletic replication and potentially constitute the sport itself. Indeed, a new model of the fan-as-immersed-e-participant is advanced as such futuristic virtual sporting realms may not only integrate fans into the spectacle but also project them into the event as participant and as the spectacle.