Facing Off Over Facebook: The Impact of Social Media on Women's Sports

Marie Hardin, Rachel Blount, Angela Ruggiero

October 19, 2009

Over the past 30 years, scholars have documented numerous ways in which traditional sport media marginalize and sexualize female athletes. Into this vast—and influential—media landscape appears the recent and exponential explosion of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Will this technological paradigm shift challenge or reproduce the ways in which female athletes are traditionally portrayed in mainstream sport media? Will the unprecedented popularity of social media—and the alternative “ways of knowing” it provides to traditional media—fundamentally alter how we view women’s sports? Panelists with diverse experiences and perspectives faced off, taking on these important and largely unexplored questions as we move into the Age of New Media.