Why is adoption of new technology in sports difficult and conservative?

Why is the adoption of new technology in sports so difficult and conservative? The gap between mainstream and fringe sharing cultures explains why.

 

At the 2009 World Swimming Championships in Rome, the International Swimming Federation announced that it would ban the use of full-body swimsuits starting in 2010. After breaking 108 world records in 2008, the full-body swimsuit was coming to an end in just two years. This was because the federation could not tolerate the reliance on high-tech swimsuits over individual performance.
But even the introduction of new technologies with no negative side effects has been met with stubborn opposition. The Hawkeye is a prime example of this. First developed in 2001 and used in tennis matches since 2006, the Hawkeye is a reading device that uses multiple cameras to capture the movement of the ball and then plot its trajectory in three dimensions. Despite the fact that there have been numerous controversial goal-line calls in matches where Hawkeye was not used, FIFA and many soccer fans have resisted the introduction of Hawkeye because it allows for much more accurate readings. At first glance, this is a difficult phenomenon to understand. The introduction of new technology is always met with opposition, even when it’s so obviously beneficial. Why is sports so conservative about adopting new technology?
Sport is a cultural phenomenon that spreads. The people who play soccer in their neighborhoods and the students who play soccer in their schoolyards didn’t acquire the knowledge of soccer, but rather the cultural phenomenon of soccer through friends, family, and the media. In this way, they spread soccer to others. In this process, people establish soccer as a shared culture. However, the transmission of cultural phenomena can be subject to errors and variations. For example, you may have had a friend in elementary school who misunderstood the rules of soccer. This friend has a variant of soccer that differs from the shared cultural soccer. These cases can usually be resolved through re-telling.
However, there are other variations of shared culture. The way amateur soccer or neighborhood soccer is played compared to professional soccer depends on the accessibility of the sport”s elements. There will be no referees, of course, and there may not even be a referee. This makes negotiation between teams about foul calls an important factor. This variation in the shared culture is due to physical conditions, which cannot be overcome through re-transmission. To represent the inequalities in sports caused by these physical conditions, we can devise the concepts of ‘mainstream shared culture (professional soccer)’ and ‘peripheral shared culture (neighborhood soccer)’. From this perspective, there is no single shared culture of sport. In sports, there is only one established “mainstream” shared culture that is recognized as the norm.
The gaps that inevitably exist in sports are not seen as limitations of the sport, but rather as legitimizing the status of the mainstream sharing culture, and the standard (the mainstream sharing culture) serves to establish the identity of the sport. Because sharers see the mainstream shared culture as the standard, they are motivated to strive to get closer to it, and this serves to coalesce the sport into a set of gaps within which it can be recognized as a shared culture.
The established mainstream shared culture, or norm, is also subject to change. The introduction of new technologies in sports is a case where the mainstream shared culture itself changes. However, the main difference from general change is that the introduction of new technology in sports betrays the shared cultural nature of the sport itself. Because the new technologies used in professional sporting events are not available to amateur athletes or the general public, sharers are unable to get closer to mainstream shared culture, despite their desire to do so. In other words, sports, a shared culture that should be accessible to the general public, is actually pushed further away from the masses by more difficult and complex technologies and devices. Not everyone can wear a full-body swimsuit. They”re too big to wear alone, and athletes usually need support staff. When the gap between mainstream shared culture and fringe shared culture becomes insurmountable and inaccessible to everyone, the sport ceases to be a shared culture. This is why the introduction of science and technology in official sports events has not been successful.
This phenomenon is stronger the larger the group of sharers. Sports that are more popular than enthusiast sports are more conservative in their adoption of technology. A sport with a large sharing group is under constant pressure from its sharing group to ensure that its standards are accessible enough to be universally enjoyed by its sharers, so that the sport can continue to reign as a universal shared culture. The reason soccer adopted the hawkeye much later than tennis is partly because goal-line calls in soccer are less frequent than net-line calls in tennis, but it’s also because soccer has a much larger shared culture than tennis. For example, fencing, which has a smaller shared community, adopted electronic scoring systems for epee, sabre, and foil in the 20th century. However, those who adhered to traditional fencing resisted the change in standards to electronic fencing, leading to a split between classical and electronic fencing.
Is the sport, then, doomed by its shared cultural nature to no longer embrace new technology? The hope to this pessimistic question is that it is not. The resistance of sharers stems from the low ubiquity and accessibility of the new technologies being introduced into standard sports, i.e., the gap between mainstream sharers and fringe sharers is a fundamental factor that works against the adoption of new technologies. Therefore, if the technology level of the fringe culture and the available sport elements are brought closer to the standard, new technologies can be introduced within the largest accessible gap. Furthermore, since sport requires a certain gap between the mainstream and the fringe to legitimize its standards, technological advancements in the fringe will not only enable, but also facilitate the adoption of technology in professional sports. It’s like a caterpillar climbing a tree. The caterpillar can’t cross the gap between its head and the other end, which is the length of its body. Nor can it get infinitely close. If the caterpillar’s head is outside the allowable gap, it will be torn apart, which means it will be disqualified as a shared culture. But if the caterpillar’s tail rises, it will give the head the strength to rise. We need to push this tail up as hard as we can. We need to improve the playground facilities in public schools and gyms, the level of technology available, and the accessible elements of the sport. Even if it’s not for social reciprocity, it’s for the sake of fairer and better sports for myself.