Contested Transparency: Media Escalation and Sports' Spaces of Visibility

Focusing on the example of professional sports, this contribution argues that an ongoing "media escalation" (the perpetual innovation of techniques to enhance comprehensibility for a diverse audience) fosters an entanglement of transparency and controversy. Combining historical and systematic perspectives, Markus Stauff claims that for more than 100 years, the imperative to make performances accountable turned the public visibility of the competition into a key concern. Drawing on a concept from laboratory studies, Stauff analyzes how sports' "spaces of visibility" reconfigure and blend multiple, often competing, modes of visibility, thereby entangling increased transparency with persistent controversy. In the conclusion, similarities and differences between sports and other social practices are discussed.