Angela McRobbie (1992) has recently observed that what is currently missing from Marxist cultural studies is a sense of urgency. In part, I believe this lack of urgency is the result of cultural studies' tendency ultimately to privilege theory over lived experience; the lived experiences of the post-baby boom generation seem especially neglected. As a 1991 issue of Spin magazine told its readers:Magazines and newspapers such as Time and the New York Times are … comparing you unfairly to the dynamic and euphoric baby boomers – the authentic prototype of youth culture, at least as they would have it. They're saying you, the members of the twentysomething generation, have no distinctive identity, no culture to call your own, only recycled bits from the past. Ask yourself this question: Do you recognize yourself in this portrait? No? We didn't think so. (Owen 1991, p. 68)
Recent and planned renovations of horse racing sites create simulcast monitor- viewing spaces to accommodate different forms of social interaction at racetracks, and, at new off-track betting facilities (OTBs), they are made to re-semble upscale sports bars. Furthermore, interactive horse race wagering services are now accessible in private space. Competition with other sports and leisure options has made viewing racing, even in person, an increasingly mediated event, raising questions about how technologies organize space and about the nature of our experiences in the physical spaces—including those devoted to sporting events—created by interactive media.
As the Internet has enabled near-instantaneous transmission of buying and selling information by brokers through servers in financial markets, and from bettors through servers in parimutuel horse racing markets, transactions that once took place in face-to-face settings are now dependent on far-reaching global communication flows. This article explores the ways in which the Internet has influenced the dissemination of information in public, temporally driven, information intensive markets. In looking specifically at the case of parimutuel horse racing, the article examines what implications the Internet has for networked markets and what it might indicate about mediated forms of presence.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.