Abstract
This chapter explores the myriad harms associated with the contemporary attachment of gambling to identity, and how these harms are amplified and played out within the digital spheres of social media and smartphone sports-betting apps. The first section argues that existing research which conceptualises gambling as separate from everyday life is largely obsolete in the contemporary context. Here, ethnographic data among a group of ‘lifestyle gamblers’ suggests that gambling has become an integral feature of the wider masculine weekend leisure experience, intimately connected to an infantilised consumer identity that is peculiar to late-capitalism. However, this chapter also argues that the socialisation of sports-betting into an identity-based betting culture has extended beyond the offline social realms of pubs and friendship groups and extended further into the online spheres of social media. Here, this chapter explores the role of ‘affiliate tipsters’ and their methods of creating ‘laddish’ and banter-filled online spaces of socialisation for forms of high-risk sports-betting. This focus upon digital lifestyle gambling brings the role of technology to the foreground. It is suggested that technology has not only loosened gambling from fixed spatial moorings, but that the underpinning algorithms of social media have created a personalised ‘technological unconscious’ in which advertisements for betting and suggestions of following betting accounts make attempts at stopping or curtailing gambling increasingly difficult for problematic and non-problematic gamblers alike. Finally, this chapter explores how the psychoanalytical processes of gambling combine with technology to fundamentally transform the digital lifestyle gambler’s relationship to money in potentially problematic ways.
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Notes
- 1.
This chapter takes issue with the notion of ‘moral panic’ more generally and their assumed prevalence. While there is no room in this brief chapter to address the flaws of this concept, Horsley (2017) offers a thorough critique.
- 2.
These include depression and anxiety disorders and the prescription of anti-depression and anti-anxiety medication despite the absence of any history of mental health problems.
- 3.
This is French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan’s term for the set of rules, customs, symbolism and prohibitions that structure social life.
- 4.
An ‘accumulator’ is where one places a bet on the outcome of multiple games. There is an almost endless myriad of accumulator options, such as betting on the result of multiple games, whether both teams will score, an over-under bet on the number of corners taking in a game and so on. All of these bets have to be correct in order to collect one’s winnings.
- 5.
Here, the individual is betting on a number of things happening in a single match. For example, a treble bet might involve an individual betting on the final result, whether both teams will score, and whether a particular individual player will score. This, of course, decreases the likelihood of betting correctly, therefore improving the potential pay-out for the gambler.
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Raymen, T. (2019). Lifestyle Gambling in Accelerated Culture. In: Raymen, T., Smith, O. (eds) Deviant Leisure. Palgrave Studies in Crime, Media and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17736-2_12
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