The Global Convergence of NHL Hockey

By: David Miller

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

Keeping consistent with my three previous blogs relating to the music industry, this blog will revolve around the discussion of another form of popular entertainment, that being the National Hockey League.  It comes to no surprise that the National Hockey League, or NHL, attributes the majority of its popularity to its Canadian audiences.  Through copious amounts of clever marketing techniques that are correlated with programming, Canadian networks like CBC use hockey as a way of bringing an entire country together in a mutual love for the game of hockey.  However, the NHL has transcended beyond its initial focus of entertaining Canadian and American audiences, for they are now engaging in what Henry Jenkins believes to be “Global Convergence culture.”

Global Convergence is understood as being the cultural hybridity that results from the inter-national circulation of media content (Jenkins, 2001).  In relation to the NHL, media is used in order to converge nations and acquire National Hockey League fans all across the globe.  This process has been made easy due in part to the process known as the “global village.”

Marshall McLuhan’s theoretical understanding of the global village suggests that an electronic nervous system, the media, is rapidly integrating the planet.  Events in one part of the world can now be experienced from other parts of the world in real-time, which is what human experience was like when we lived in small villages (McLuhan, 1964).  The NHL has tapped into this idea through their strategic manipulation of mediated content.  Through blogs and information on the Internet, social media announcements, live games aired across multiple television and radio channels, articles in sports magazines, etc. fans now have access to NHL content at all times and in any place around the globe.  The results seem to be successful, for the NHL has risen beyond acquiring fans all across North America, and has begun to develop popularity throughout Europe.  Copious amounts of NHL games have been played in European cities for the better part of the past decade- specifically within Berlin, London, Stockholm, Helsinki and many more.

In addition to games being played in Europe, the National Hockey League has quietly been considering expanding within Europe by putting an actual NHL team in a large European city.  This idealization, although simply a rumor at this point in time, has been generating copious amounts of attention in the hockey world.  However, regardless of whether or not this expansion may or may not happen, it only shines light on how NHL hockey has become an aspect of Global Convergence Culture.  If this idea does in fact become a reality, one may begin to question what’s next for this multi-billion dollar industry?