[tel] +44 (0) 151 794 2540
[mob] +44 (0) 7962 716 616
[fax] +44 (0) 151 794 2997
[listserv] join the mailing list
[email] email@culturalolympics.org.uk

Symposium:

The Olympics and Web 2.0
Performing Citizenship through New Media Cultures

Host, Location, Date:
Bryght, British Columbia Canada Place, Torino, 17 February, 2006

Organisers:
Kris Krug (Industry Chair, Bryght)
Dr Andy Miah (Academic Chair, University of Paisley, UK);

“a stronger partnership between sport and the Internet would be of
great service to the fans, the governing bodies and the world’s media’
Juan Antonio Samaranch, President of the IOC, 2000.

In 2000, the IOC World Conference on Sport and New Media marked a threshold for imagining the role of emerging communication technologies within the Olympic Movement. In the final session of that conference, a panel concluded that it would be ten years before 3G was a reality, by which time broadband would be sufficiently pervasive to pose a challenge to how the Olympics is experienced.  In 2010, when Vancouver hosts the next Olympic winter Games, those 10 years will have passed and thousands of Olympic visitors will now be broadcasting ‘their’ Olympics to the world.

The Olympic Games is renowned as a celebration of sport, culture and the environment with millions of people logging on and tuning in around the world to watch, listen or read about the events. Yet, few of these people are able to attend the competitions or enjoy any form of personal interaction with the athletes. Even fewer are able to enact the ideological manifesto of the Olympic Movement, which is to bring about social change through international collaboration.

New interactive elements of the web are beginning to transform this by allowing people all over the world a greater closeness with their favourite sports, which can enable a fuller participation in the Olympic festival. This move from passive spectatorship to total immersion holds great promise, as Web 2.0 becomes a reality.

While the mass media will continue to provide the majority of traditional coverage, everyone from passionate fans to the athletes themselves are generating a different sort of conversation around sport and culture at the Olympics. This includes all forms of media, from the still expanding written word of the blogosphere, to audio and video generated on the spot, shared with the world, and downloaded on demand to computers and mobile devices.

Where once the Olympics traded on its capacity to be the only global event, an increasing amount of localized voices is facilitated by millions of visual and textual communications that document what is taking place during every second of the Olympic host city’s metamorphosis.

The consequences of this for creative media industries and Olympic stakeholders are profound. For many, they signal the changing landscapes of traditional and citizen media productions, offering the potential to democratise access to the Games and storytelling about it.

While the 2006 Winter Olympics in Torino will still very much represent the shift, we can start examining what will change between now, the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, and beyond.

Join some new media companies from British Columbia for a discussion with leading voices about the converging domains of new media technology, cultural activity, and the Olympics.

Search wikipedia: web 2.0, weblog, journalism, citizenship, digital cities, social software

Audience: new media industry specialists, Olympic organising committees, Olympics researchers