A Mobile Olympics: Viral Cities, Mobile Media and Mega-Events
1. A MOBILE OLYMPICS Professor Andy Miah, PhD University of the West of Scotland www.andymiah.net Viral Cities, Mobile Media and Mega-Events (All photography by Andy Miah & Beatriz Garcia, unless otherwise indicated)
4. olympic cities The Olympic Games is more than the sport competitions It is a manifestation of political ideals It is a humanitarian movement It is a showcase for media technology It is an urban regeneration project It is a sociologically divisive intervention
5. olympic games powerful global brand; largest mega-event
35. media occupation NBC studio in Torino’s main square during Games time
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37. city cleansing Identity is suppresed and mythologised during an Olympics
38. olympic activism Athens 2004, for the 23 venue construction workers who died
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41. social concern The Games as historical gesturing towards a global identity
42. protest culture Identity is performed around a Games delivery
43. text How should we think about Olympic space in a mobile world?
44. “ The Olympics are haunted by the inconvenient fact that they have to be held somewhere. Ideally they should be held nowhere, anywhere, and everywhere always.” (Weinstein, 1993)
45. remote devices July 5 2005, a day before the 2012 bid decision is made
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48. Cost of sms in uk Average of 12p per sms 1 character = 1 byte sent 160 charcaters = 160 bytes £750 = 1MB Or less than one of these...
50. Rio 2016.... the and me British Olympic Association.... International Olympic Academy.... Sydney 2000.... Lausanne 2001.... Salt Lake City 2002.,.. Athens 2004.... Torino 2006.... Beijing 2008.... Vancouver 2010.... London 2012.... Sochi 2014.... Web 2.0 organizing committee Web 1.0 Web 2.0 journalists Web 3.0 collective intelligence?
69. “ Forget CNN or any of the major American "news" networks. If you want to get the latest on the opposition protests in Iran, you should be reading blogs, watching YouTube or following Twitter updates from Tehran, minute-by-minute.” Ari Berman, 2009.06.15
I want to instil a number of notions into how you think about digital culture. The first is that digital technology is an activist device. It can be used to provoke and engage people’s attention. The second is that digital technology can be used to criticize the media, the arbitor of identity. Third, I want to claim that Olympic Games – and perhaps mega-events generally – are particularly interesting exemplars of such activism and this is because they involve participation from the widest range of media.
City disruption
Let’s start with something simple, a text message. July 6 2005, a day before the decision to award the Games to London in 2012. A day of a terrorist attack in London, which would ultimately overshadow London’s victory. How does such an unexpected juxtapositioning of events affect the willingness of a nation to celebrate? What most adequately reflects the identity of the UK over that period? At the time, I was at the Live8 concert taking place at Edinburgh’s Murrayfield Stadium As it was also the day before the G8 summit at Gleneagles.
How should we read this text message? Is it a personal message? One-to-one? One-to-many? I suspect Jude’s message was one to many. This principle is similar to twitter
Speed up youth culture Raise global-local or cultural indusries China group slow
168 countries, with 28 million minutes of coverage – that's more than 53 years of airtime.
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