Week 1- ESPN Texas

Article 1

At first, this article caught my eye because of the title's use of the word microcosm.  Having never heard that word before class, I was intrigued.  After reading the article I realized that it had a lot more to do with the overwhelming addiction that people in the United States, and all over the world for that matter, have with sports.  It argues about how funding and things like recruiting affects college sports.  How are smaller or less funded schools like Iowa supposed to compete with schools who can afford a 300 million dollar television network?  With the creation of a branch of ESPN specifically for a Texas audience, we can see how important sports are in the United States. Even with channels like ESPN, people are constantly looking for excuses to keep up on the happenings in the world of sport.  Since the creation of ESPN in 1979, there have been 23 more channels in the ESPN family of networks, not counting the new addition of ESPN Texas, the ESPN radio channels, or it's wide array of websites.  It's not hard to see how important sports are to our culture in the United States.  Sports are a social phenomena.  They connect people that would never relate to each other in any other way.  They are a huge part of our society and helped to shape our culture into what it is today.