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Paper short abstract:

The game of cricket has been transformed from being a sport to becoming a platform, built on a substrate of technologies such as the television and ICTs. This paper examines critically the intricacies of the influence of technology in cricket and the politics of speed that it appears to engender.

Paper long abstract:

In the shift from five-day long test matches to one-day games and then to Twenty20 formats, the game of cricket has undergone a profound reworking. From politics to colonialism, from connoisseur cricket to 'cricketainment', and from commercialisation to technological innovations; the transformations within cricket can be used as a metaphor for several transformations within society. While there has been a great deal of discussion centred on cricket, there has not been much of an emphasis on the implications of technology on the game. This gap has been made more palpable by the ever increasing use of technology in almost every aspect of the game—from playing to umpiring to broadcast. The television, one of the great strides in the development of electronic technology, has become, in a manner of speaking, the raison d'être for a sports event—cricket or otherwise. My work attempts to examine critically the intricacies of the influence of technology in cricket and the politics of speed that it appears to engender. I will attempt to examine how technology has impacted, facilitated, and spurred a ruptural transformation within the sport of cricket, altering its internal biology and reassembling the sport as a platform. Further, I wish to examine how the idea of cricket has been influenced by the politics of speed, how the playing 'field' has been transformed along with the idea of the spectator, and how a sporting-entertainment complex has replaced the traditional idea of sport.