Social media and technology are celebrated for their disruptive power. Witness their success in erasing the line between performer and audience. The same seems to be happening to boxing, with technology closing the gap between the seer and the seen.
In theater this line is known as “the fourth wall,” which is really a window that reveals what is inside the box of the stage. The audience sees the players, but the fiction is that the players don’t see the audience. When an actor breaks the fourth wall by addressing the audience, the fiction evaporates. The play then become a real event, just as is our watching it is a real event. Players and viewers now share the same time and space.
Breaking this imaginary wall is a theater tradition. Characters in medieval drama often speak to the audience, and some of Shakespeare’s characters also address those in attendance. Breaking the fourth wall allows directors and authors to demonstrate cynicism or reveal to us information that is not available to those who remain bound by the laws of fiction—for example, when Kevin Spacey speaks to the camera in House of Cards, a moment adapted from Richard III, in which direct address is common.
The fourth wall can also be broken by the audience member. We cringe at the over-eager opera fan whose “Bravo!” obliterates the end of an aria, or the sports fan who bellows throughout the game or match. Those people are not simply demonstrating their imaginary super-fan status. Although seated in the audience, they appear to be as involved in the action as the performers, and certainly more involved than the rest of the viewers.
Insufferable at the opera or in a theater, this pretension is routine at sports events and rock concerts. Thirty years ago, Barbra Streisand set a precedent at Wimbledon, the famously decorous sports venue, calling out encouragement for Andre Agassi, her flavor of the month, 28 years her junior. The media, as well as Pete Sampras, who won the match, commented unfavorably on the “vocal backing” she offered throughout the nearly-three-hour match. Rank may have its privileges, but in 1993 Streisand was not the star at Wimbledon that she was in Hollywood. Silence is, and was, golden.
There is also a fourth wall in boxing, defined by the ropes around the modern boxing ring. Few painters captured boxing drama better than George Bellows (d. 1923), perhaps the greatest American boxing artist (I discuss his work in Boxing and Masculinity, ch. 23). One of the curious features of his famous pastel of 1907, “The Knock Out,” is the absence of a rope-wall to separate viewers and boxers. In later works in oil, Bellows painted a roped, four-sided ring. In “The Knock Out” there are ropes at the back and to the sides of the canvas but not across the front (the image is widely available on the web; in Boxing and Masculinity, see p. 219).
Spectators grap the ropes and lean into the boxers’ space. In the center foreground, impossible to miss, is a grinning man, cigar in hand, who turns to the viewer, delighted with the mayhem. Bellows uses him break through a different wall, the canvas that separates the audience in the painting from the audience of the painting.
For Bellows, the canvas was the fourth wall. For people today, the fourth wall is the screen. Music and film producers are busy figuring out ways to make it more engaging. The want to make viewers feel that they are inside the experience they are witnessing. Boxing promoters are also working to push their product to a more sophisticated and engaging level by using big daga. Let’s take a look at the influence of social media on audiences of concerts and films shown in theaters and then see how boxing is being adapted to high tech.
Watch me watch!
Social media enable connections between performers and audience members, between the observed and the observer. A recent report in the Wall Street Journal concerns behavior at one of the hit movies of summer 2023, the pink extravaganza known as “Barbie.” Ann-Marie Alcántara reports on cell-phone use during the film.
“Many attendees are forgetting the cardinal rule: Never take out a phone during the film,” Alcántara writes. “Instead, people are picking out selfies to post, scrolling during dull moments, even taking pictures of the screen—with the flash on. TikTok is inspiring a new generation of theatergoers to act out and even post their antics on social media” (“Movie-Theater Behavior Has Gone Off the Reels,” WSJ, Aug. 4, 2023; https://www.wsj.com/articles/movie-theater-behavior-has-gone-off-the-reels-8d3ba0b).
The article quotes a movie-goer who observed “a concert-ification of movies” in which those who experience the movie share their experience with those not in the theater. They combine their role as observer with their self-appointed role as star. Their followers watch the watcher react to what the watcher is watching. The movie itself is background for the watcher’s performance.
The phrase “concert-ification of movies” is apt. What is going on at concerts? Alcántara elsewhere explains “why people are getting more disruptive at concerts” (WSJ, March 28, 2023). Some fans carry signs so large that they block the view of those around them. Others scream so persistently that the performer has to ask them to stop—that’s the moment the screamers hope will go viral. Peope are getting more disruptive becuase they want to be the stars of their own videos.
A related phenomenon is early departure. Alcántara notes that some of those who attend a concert stay only for the one or two numbers that they have seen on TicToc or other social media. They aren’t interested in the rest of the performance. If the warm-up act is the group with the viral video, people leave before the main attraction takes the stage. If they sing along, they can repeat only lyrics from bits they have seen on TicToc.
These concertgoers only want to take in the segments they already know that they like. Social media and technology have made it possible for them to tailor every part of their life to their whims and desires. Their main experiential mode is the scroll. They don’t just scroll social media. They scroll life, tuning in briefly if something catches their attention, then moving on to the next bit, the next tune, the next picture, the next post. They are present at—they attend to—fragments.
Ashley Wong points to a darker side of the concert experience, fans throwing items at performers (go to https://www.wsj.com/articles/concerts-fans-throwing-objects-cardi-b-pink-1824ba67; July 31, 2023). One rushed on stage and slapped a singer, shades of Will Smith man-slapping Chris Rock. Another singer was hit by a cell phone and had to get stitches. Bags are now searched at the entry point; glass bottles and laser pointers are not allowed. Fans used to throw flowers (at Elvis) or even undergarments (at Tom Jones). The new objects are not so benign. Singers use social media to cultivate their fans, but they can’t be too happy with the new fan behavior social media promotes. Social media make it possible for concert-goers want to be part of the performance they capture on their smart phones, a work in which he singer is a bit player.
Box me in
In concerts and movies, fans seem to have taken the initiative. Not so with boxing, an area in which broadcasters have been looking for ways to close the gap between fighters and onlookers and to enrich the screen experience. Their goal is to turn up new users and fans and to do so by making boxing more like Mixed Martial Arts and Ultimate Fighting Championship, sporting venues considerably hipper than boxing has ever been. Knowing something about boxing is like knowing something about wine. Experience and observation are required, along with a lot of detail.
Our brains do some of the work boxing promoters what to turn over to technology. In many sports, the phenomenon called covert experience can cause fans to experience emotions similar to those of the players. Our mirror neurons respond to actions other perform—a version of “monkey see, monkey do.” These neurons are stimulated by sight and perform the way they would perform if we were doing the action rather than looking at it. This explains why some fans are so excited at ballgames, making a connection nicely captured in the title of the book Your Brain on Cubs: Inside the Heads of Players and Fans (2008, ed. Dan Gordon; see especially the chapter by Kelli Whitlock Burton and Hillary R. Rodman, “It Isn’t Whether You Win or Lose, It’s Whether You Win”).
For boxers, the connection between performer and spectator deeper. Boxers who watch a fight instinctively throw their own punches, living the fight as if the fight were theirs (see Boxing and Masculinity, chapter 7). More than mirror neurons are activated. The connection does not depend only on sight. It is deepened by the boxing moves stored in our muscle memory. The bond between the boxer in the ring and the boxer watching the match might seem like “monkey see,” but it depends on many hours of hard work with the two boxers have practiced their boxing skills.
Technology built around big data have been developed with the aim of improving the fight experience for fans in the arena and at home. The connections do not depend on shared experience or “monkey see.” Rather, the connection is primarily visual.
Bringing remote viewers closer to the action began with televised boxing. Technology now does the same thing in the arena. For the 2022 fight between Tyson Fury and Dillian Whyte, for example, 94,000 fans packed Wembley Stadium. Without screens, only a fraction of the crowd could have seen the fight in detail (Fury won; for details, go to https://pro.sony/en_ME/live-production/live-production-insights/tyson-fury). The ring is dwarfed by the two screens and huge supporting structure that frame it.
Tickets ranged from $71 to $2500 (the latter including a “hospitality package”).Pay-per-view was about $50. The “concert-ification of movies” seems to apply to boxing as well, both in pricing and in presentation.
High-tech boxing has been in development for several years, but its future seems uncertain. In 2015 NBC launched a project designed “to make boxing cool,” as Matt Hartigan put it (see “Connected Gloves and ‘Bullet Time’: NBC Thinks Technology Can Make Boxing Cool” at https://www.fastcompany.com/3042958/nbc-primetime-boxing-connected-gloves-high-tech-cameras). “It may be the sweet science, but boxing hasn’t been modernized, well, maybe ever,” he advises.
The project enlisted engineers and boxers in order to make the “thinking” of boxing “more visible,” broadcast HD “with video-game-like graphics and Matrix-like camera angles.” (The kind of camera required for this magic is seen above.) The aim was to offset competition from mixed martial arts “and to draw in younger, more casual audiences who may never have thought about watching before.” Presumably a “Matrix-like” experience would attract them, offering them something that resembled what they had seen in a movie theater. A secondary aim of making the “thinking” of boxing visible is to help fans know who is winning at a given moment. The technology involving big data aims to “measure fighters’ performance as well as the details of their punches—including angle, velocity, and impact—in mere milliseconds.” Those data would be used by broadcasters and, behind the scenes, by coaches and others.
A similar system was in the works at HBO, which has since dropped boxing because there were not enough viewers. Hartigan reports that high-tech cameras are now used in baseball and football as well, the latter known for closely-examined controversial decisions.
Also in 2015, BKB (Big Knockout Boxing) proposed to bring big data to boxing. Evander Holyfield is quoted as saying, “Boxing in the big ring has gotten kind of boring—there’s not a lot of rock ‘em sock ‘em." He made an exception for the then-upcoming fight between Manny Pacquiao and Floyd Mayweather Jr., but that fight was considered a dud (Mayweather won). BKB these days seems to focus on bare-knuckle boxing, not boxing prize fights like those involving these two stellar boxers. (See Joe Bargmann, “Boxing Glove Sensors Track the Force of Every Blow,” Popular Mechanics; https://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a14919/boxing-gloves-sensors-data/).
In 2018 Seamus Gleason thought that fan engagement would be promoted by this technology. This image is from his Linked-In page. Many of his observations have been made elsewhere. He notes that boxing is an “archaic sport” burdened by tradition and resistant to modernization. Its popularity has fallen, pulled down by MMA, which is very popular with younger audiences. He concludes that “successful integration of analytics could be the antidote to this decline.” His readers seem to agree (https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/possibilities-big-data-analytics-within-boxing-shay-gleeson-1).
At least in boxing, however, this high-tech approach does not seem to have taken hold. One problem, of course, is how all these data might, or might not, confirm what the judges decide. And there seem to be others. When you Google “high-tech boxing cameras” these days you get information about punch counters and training tools, not information about making the “thinking” of boxing “more visible” in HD.
One as to wonder what happened. Was big data too much data for audiences to take in when they were also trying to watch a fight? Do you really need to know the velocity of a punch to see that it was an effective one? Gleason is attentive to the young audience’s need “for constant information” and thinks big data would help “casual boxing fans who don’t fully understand what’s going on when they’re watching a fight.”
He also notes that big data could “make an impact off screen and outside of the arenas,” helping to refine training with sensors and trackers that monitor reaction time and a fighter’s mix of combinations. It seems to me that such applications are more likely to take hold, if fighters and coaches can afford them, than data-heavy screens that flood the viewers with statics regarding speed and force that are not interpreted by experts. How many of these metrics will “casual boxing fans” grasp?
The screen above, with graphics over the boxer’s faces, is from Gleason’s 2018 article. It shows what viewers would see during at match using the proposed system: the type, speed, and force of the punch shown as well as the round number and duration. Expert estimates of the total number of punches thrown in a round range from 30 to 100, the lower figure for heavyweights, the higher for lighter classes. That means viewers would be looking at between 30 to 100 such graphic overlays per round, appearing in rapid sequence. Since boxers often land punches at the same time, hitting and getting hit in the same couple of seconds, the data will pile up quickly.
Gleason believes that such a system “would help to satisfy the millennials’ need for constant information and increase engagement amongst the more casual boxing fans who don’t fully understand what’s going on when they’re watching a fight.” He likes the idea that “information made available through the integration of analytics will help it become accessible to a mass audience.”
I am skeptical of his view. Younger audiences might be interested in “constant information,” but what constitutes “information”? For countless young uses, “information” means “what I see,” meaning images, brief phrases, pictures, and memes. A reaction to what is seen or heard is not equivalent to the process of interpretation, which requires thought and time and a knowledge base.
I have difficulty imagining what Gleason’s phrase, “the integration of analytics,” would men to the young people he wants to draw to boxing. They stare at their screens or flip through hundreds of images on Instagram. “Analytics” means systematic analysis of statistics or other deep data, including numbers and readings projected over a boxer’s face as his opponent lands a punch.
To set a sophisticated collection boxing analytics before audiences who probably have no idea of what “lbs of force” means (much less that feels like) seems as foolish to me as decanting your best burgundy for a teenager who has never tasted wine. Even writers inclined to optimism note that attention spans for certain kinds of tasks have been notably shortened in the recent decades, for all people but especially for the young.
Accumulated information leading to deep studies is devalued. A knowledge of grapes, vineyards, and vintages, to pursue the wine analogy, is replaced by a quick sip. In social media, real-time reporting and one-line summaries crowd out analysis. Words used to define “information,” Gleason’s key word, included “data,” “intelligence,” and “knowledge.” Even emoticons contain what we might call “information,” such as disapproval, joy, confusion. However, anyone wanting to clarify or contextualize that intelligence will have to engage in comparisons and contrasts, acquire more data, and make judgments. Analysis is not a one-off impression. Social media are all about one-off impressions and immediate reactions, not reflection.
Optimists—I used the word advisedly—point to the ways in which technology has changed societies in the past. They note that people have always adapted—to phones, to cars, to computers. They predict that we will adapt to social media as well.
But social media differ from those innovations. Each innovation demanded more effort that what it replaced and added new complications to social life, and not only in the early phases of adaptation. We have been used to cars for a long time, but who is used to self-driving vehicles? Cell phones have multiple uses; for most people they replace a device that had a single use. Looming over all such discussions as the one I continue here is Artificial Intelligence, the next step in technology that replaces human interaction with something far more complex and powerful. It is difficult to feel confident that our direction is a good one.
Thank you for this! Fascinating.