That was in the '60s. Now, technology has raised the level of chatter about sport to a ridiculous degree.

Soccer, as an example, engages 22 men or women, with a referee and two touch judges. This is the original and real game, played and controlled by each in their first person. It is merely seen by me and by you — sport squared. A dozen camera operators film aspects of the game that even the 25 originals couldn't see in 90 minutes. Sport cubed. The host channel shows edited highlights, with unending replays from seriously improbable angles — sport to the fourth power at least.

Those who didn't go to the game can listen to and then discuss the commentators' post-game chatter. Sport to the fifth. The press people can now chatter about what they saw of sport squared or cubed, or what they think they saw, and we can then chatter about their chatter. Sport to the nth power.

But there is something new about that far-distant original game one: the hyper-reality of gadgetry. The photo-finish in horseracing began in 1888. The human eye couldn't always pick the winner, hence the innovation. The instant replay began in Canadian ice hockey in 1963 because the eye couldn't follow the puck into the net. From then on, gadgetry has moved all sport to the umpteenth degree.

Is anything quite as bizarre as Channel Nine's televised cricket? In case you didn't grasp the reality of the last bowl, Nine has eagle-eye, hawkeye, snickometer, audio mike and stumpcam, and instant replay. Nth sport is so much more fun than the original, and you don't have to concentrate half, even a tenth, as much. You can freeze it and record it and play it again. You can never have that kind of buzz if you go to the SCG or MCG. In truth, there is no point going to the game (and increasingly more don't). And if you do go, you'll be watching replays anyway on the big screen.

And as if that wasn't enough, now Channel Nine has asked the Australian cricket team to install dressing-room cameras for the Ashes. This follows a trial of the cameras during a Twenty20 friendly this week and the nation-wide coverage of Australian rugby league centre Brent Tate's tears, captured by cameras in the dressing room, after being diagnosed with a serious injury.

Soccer is also not immune from chatter. Were the Dutch and Paraguyan players offside? Did an England shot cross the goalie's line against Germany, the one in which England was skewered 4-1? Inevitably there were universal screams about no goalpost cameras to record the "truth". Duly, there will be dozens of cameras in Brazil 2014, and we, the chatterers, can then watch and re-watch that which is now past tense, inconclusive, irreversible and deliciously debatable.

In much of life we seek the truth because we need the truth. Have I got colon cancer? I need to know, and so does my family. The gastroenterologist uses whatever gadgetry will detect the disease or its absence. Does my eye, or anyone else's, need to find truth through the camera's actual voyage?

There are millions of events of moment that happen and, having happened, become part of experience and history. We accept most verdicts about the "happened", and we do chatter about them — particularly women. But why so much natter and clatter about sport? Eco's answer is that sport "is the maximum aberration of 'phatic' speech", which is really a negation of speech.

Phatic speech is meaningless speech, as in "G'day, how's it going?" or "have a nice day" or "catch you later" — small talk phrases intended to produce a sense of sociability, sometimes uttered in the hope that it will lead to further and more real intercourse, but human enough even if the converse goes no further.

Sport is international phatic but also a crucial Australian (male) vehicle. It enables not just short, passing greetings but allows for what may seem like deep, passionate and meaningful conversations but which in the end are unmemorable, empty, producing nothing and enhancing no one.

Colin Tatz is visiting fellow in the College of Arts and Social Sciences, Australian National University.