Sports Audiences and Fandom

Sports Audience has always been the key factor in any given sports success. Obviously certain sports would not survive if people didn't pay for tickets to go see them or watch them on TV. Wenner has described a cultural development of watching our favorite teams play and especially attending live games. Going to an MLB game in the summer is a traditional memory of my childhood. So many cultural norms have come from professional sports. The Super Bowl is probably the best example of a day that almost everyone in America knows of and celebrates and in reality it's all surrounding one game. Although it's just one game that may not directly effect any of our lives, sporting events have always been a great way that people relieve stress and have a relaxing afternoon at a game.
Another good example is baseball after the 9/11 attacks. Baseball became a very meaningful way for thousands  of strangers to come together and try and get away from it all. A certain level of bonding together was felt in all Americans after 9/11, and baseball was a positive influence on that as a whole. Through the past decade of an economy in shambles, the sporting industry has been one of the few things that have thrived. The combination of social networking and advanced ways to get your sports have only helped this gigantic industry. Wenner's book has linked different generations with different social role models in the sports world.
Every generation has had players that young people look up to, but now social media has made it so fans get closer than ever before to their favorite players. Twitter has blown up so quickly and so many prominent athletes use it to the point where it has already started becoming a social norm to use it. Sports audiences have been able to be bigger than ever for any game. Now anyone can view live games on a computer, ipad or smartphone, as well as the watching a game in person or on TV. The sporting industry has also made huge profits through the use of live games on a phone. I read a sportsbusinessdaily.com article about the success of MLBTV and MLBAM. According to the article, in 2010 an app called MLB At-Bat was the highest grossing iphone app.
It's also become extremely easy to get tickets to games almost instantly. The article stated that over 34 million MLB tickets were sold in the 10' season, which was roughly half the attendance for the entire season. The technological advancements of the past five years have developed a new way we watch and therefore developing a new audiences. Wenner said that our cultural values are being expressed through sports media in terms of how close they are followed by the media. Watching a game on some sort of electronic device has just seemed to become the primary way people view games. Fans still attend games, but the audience has become much larger than whoever is watching it in the stadium. Before all the technological advances of our time, it used to be the people at the game were the only ones that saw it. In this generation a sports audience could expand 50 times the amount of people in the seats.

Sources:  http://www.sportsbusinessdaily.com/Journal/Issues/2011/03/21/Media/MLBAM.aspx?hl=Sports%20Audiences%20and%20fandom%20&sc=0
Wenner, Lawrence, ed. Mediasport. New York: Routledge, 1998