Media Blueprint for London 2012
A proposal by
Professor Andy Miah, PhD
University of the West of Scotland

[v1.0, 2010.07.16]

[please comment on the outline, so you can inform the next version]
1. Context

1.1 In 2009, the IOC indicated its intention to develop a new strategy for its role in a time of radical media change. London 2012 will be the first Summer Games to be informed by this new approach to promoting the value of social media

1.2 The London 2012 Games coincide with the scheduled targets set by the Digital Britain report & Race Online 2012, indicating a new era of potential media engagement. This provides an opportunity to re-think the new media infrastructure within the United Kingdom.

1.3 The Games represent the largest media event in the world, with broadcasters from over 200 countries covering what happens.

1.4 I envisage the Games as a media festival rather than a media event, where the media are enabled to report much more than just the sports competition. The Cultural Olympiad should be at the heart of this festival of ideas.

1.5 Olympic & Paralympic media centres have the opportunity to shift from being spaces of information and mediation, to becoming factories for creativity, collaboration, and engagement, which can amplify the Olympic mission.

1.6 The London 2012 Media Landscape will include 13,000 broadcast journalists, 7,000 print journalists, who will cover sport. There will be an additional 12,000+ non-accredited professional journalists who will want cover all non-sport content. However, the largest population of reporters will be citizens, over 60,000,000 with camera phones wanting to report their Games.

1.7 If the Olympic movement can expand media participation without jeopardizing its financial base, then it can more adequately fulfil its role as a progressive social movement.

1.8 Olympic cybercitizens are already taking ownership of reporting their Games and they will need a structure for their participation in 2012.

1.9 In this context, the London 2012 Games can be a moment for realizing a new media legacy for the United Kingdom, built on the idea of citizen media reporting and the recognition that the Games are more than just sports competitions. They are social movements with high humanitarian and cultural aspirations.

1.10 To achieve a broader media participatory culture, it is necessary to develop an extended media network for Games time reporting, which builds on the strategic development of non-accredited media centres at previous Games, linking them to citizen media projects.

1.11 Such a network would be founded on principles of ‘open media’ and will facilitate community legacies and build stories about London, the Nations and the Regions that reach an international audience. It will focus on reporting all non-sporting legacy stories, locating culture and art at the heart of its practice. Its work will transcend national boundaries in ways that no other Games has achieved before, by promoting peer-to-peer conversations.
2. A Nationwide Independent Media Backbone

Reaching out to all regions, with hubs in Glasgow, Manchester, London

2.1 This apolitical dream space will bring into force the full commitment of Olympic ideology to promote social change for the good of humanity. These values accord with the philosophy of Olympism.

2.2 Funding is in place to develop the initial scoping for these infrastructures, by identifying partners and commitments from institutions who would host and stage reporters. Principally, this will involve staging an event for potential partners and contributors at the Abandon Normal Devices digital media Festival on October 4, 2010.

2.3 We will focus discussions on operational challenges, collaboration logistics and infrastructure aiming to bring representation from the IOC and LOCOG and the potential UK partners.

2.4 The media who work in such centres should have a local interest but an aspiration that is based on global values or the desire to build opportunities to share globally. Transcending national boundaries is the biggest task. We’re not yet global, despite digital culture
3. Goals

3.1 Augment the Olympic media narrative towards portraying broader dimensions of the philosophy of Olympism

3.2 Create public engagement around Games time

3.3 Promote community legacy for the nations and regions
4. Research Led

4.1 The centres will function as real-time experiments, providing focal points for understanding the social media community and its interface with mass media.

4.2 Coming to terms with the politics of the citizen journalist will greatly assist future event hosts, like Glasgow 2014, Sochi 2014, Rio 2016 and World Cup 2018

4.3 The International Olympic Committee can focus its conversation with citizen media around these hubs
5. Values

5.1 Through the Olympic & Paralympic Games, we want to create space for intercultural dialogue and collaboration.

5.2 We value the Olympiad as a time to address issues of critical social importance for Britain.

5.3 We will support communities to tell their Olympic & Paralympic stories and work with professional journalists to meet their needs.

5.4 We want to expand media privileges to concerned citizens.

5.5 We promote responsible and fair journalism in an open media culture, where content is shared and power distributed.

5.6 We will respect the right of groups to express their political views and support different voices in being heard
6. Need

6.1 The Olympic & Paralympic media are focused on sports almost exclusively during Games time, but this can and should encompass broader legacy stories.

6.2 Digital media has given rise to a proliferation of citizen journalists who want to report the Games.

6.3 Legacies for the Nations and Regions, along with London’s story need other media centres to have space to explain what the Games have meant to them.

6.4 These centres raise a number of questions. Who should fund them? How should they relate to the Olympic & Paralympic infrastructure more broadly? Can they even exist given their desire to build into the intellectual property of the Olympic & Paralympic Games?”
7. How this fits with the nations’ aspirations for London 2012

7.1 The bid promise from London 2012 was to create a national Games, but we would be the only media centres to tell those stories.

7.2 We celebrate Olympic & Paralympic values by promoting the broad ideology of the Olympic & Paralympic Games as a social movement.

7.3 We are a not-for-profit infrastructure, fostering educational practice and public engagement with the Games.

7.4 Through our network, we will constitute the largest network of social media producers throughout the UK and reinvigorate the core media partners of the Games.

7.5 Our content will reach international networks that other media will not reach.

7.6 Our journalists will produce the largest volume of Olympic content and influence trending topics on social media platform, crating the largest Olympic and Paralympic archive of any Games.
8. Why accredited Olympic media will need us

8.1 Media organizations in the UK will traverse the country around Games time, requiring facilities and stories we can provide, particularly around the torch relay.

8.2 To fully report on the London 2012 Games, it will be necessary to see what is happening in the Nations and Regions.

8.3 The Olympic Games is a social movement, not a sporting event. What happens in the country will become its central legacy

8.3.1 CASE STUDY: For example, NBC is setting up a media space around Birmingham City University, as the USA team will be based here. The local community media can interface with this. For example, NBC is setting up a media space around Birmingham City University, as the USA team will be based here. The local community media can interface with this. As well, the CitizensEye in Leicester will create a community media centre that will operate around Games time. Team GB will be in Loughborough. Creating an infrastructure to bring about media change could markedly change how the Olympics works

8.4 While the proposal should aspire to build a network that includes all nations and regions, it will be useful to begin with a hub of centres based on known interests. Glasgow, Manchester & London presents a backbone for the network.

8.5 These centres will draw stories from each other to communicate what has been happening and what is happening during Games time. However, events should also build on global networks, particularly previous Games experience to develop the idea of a cultural legacy that extends beyond London. Satellite centres will provide programmatic content during the Games.
9. What was achieved at previous Games: Vancouver 2010

9.1 True North Media house accredits a 5 yr old as a journalist and an Olympic mascot.

9.2 W2 is the first independent media centre to work with an Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games.

9.3 VANOC appoints a number of young people to be its official citizen journalism team during the Games
10. What will these media hubs look like?

10.1 The influence of any specific media centre will be restricted by its funding, its technology and its community, but primarily the latter. Hub centres can be high-tech facilities with large venue space, but all should aspire to similar networked facilities to maximize participation. We all should be able to plug into each others’ space at any time to deliver audio, visual and interaction.

10.2 Imagine
• High technology facilities
• Networked Infrastructure
• Community Generated Content
• International Media Attention
• Lasting Media Legacy
11. Opportunity

11.1 As part of the initial scoping, we will identify primary partner vehicles, which may be digital media centres around the UK that could have the capacity to deliver a media centre during Games time. However, communities should also be evaluated on their networked potential ie. How prolific are they online. Amplifying their content will be our biggest asset to achieve our goals.

11.2 With 2 years before the Games, this is the time to establish permissions and funding. However, this is still a relatively short amount of time to build partnerships with larger organizations, those who may decide to allocate their programme budget to such a project. This may be the primary route towards ensuring the proposal is realized.

In closing, this proposal brings together the primary instigators of independent Olympic & Paralympic media centres and creative, artistic practice from the last 10 years of the Olympic & Paralympic Games. With the right support, it has the potential to tell the full story of the London 2012 Games
Stay in touch, join:

http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/media2012

About the Author
Professor Miah is Chair of Ethics and Emerging Technologies at the University of the West of Scotland, a Fellow at the Foundation for Art and Creative Technology and part of the Programming Committee for the Abandon Normal Devices Festival, an ‘inspired by 2012’ event, funded by the Legacy Trust.

Professor Miah is an Olympic scholar and writer, having undertaken research into Olympic media at every summer and winter Olympic Games since Sydney 2000, at which he has also worked as a journalist. He has been a visiting Professor at the International Olympic Academy, a Visiting Scholar at the International Olympic Committee museum in Lausanne and teaches Olympic Studies at the University of the West of Scotland, supervising PhD students whose work focuses on Olympic media. While at the Vancouver 2010 Games, he wrote for The Huffington Post, facilitated cultural collaborations between London 2012 and Vancouver 2010 and was on the steering committee for the creation of two independent media centres. He also writes for the Guardian. He is currently completing a book called ‘A Digital Olympics’ for The MIT Press.

@andymiah
email@andymiah.net
+44 (0) 757 898 4147

9th November 2010, St. Hugh’s College, Oxford

With the 2012 Games now fast approaching, this year’s conference will explore opportunities presented by the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games to re-vitalise curricula to enhance student learning opportunities and experiences, and to encourage student engagement with learning. Keynote speakers are currently being confirmed and they will be chosen to reflect different perspectives of the Games which can stimulate developmental initiatives, for example:

• “Capturing Olympic and Paralympic Values in the Curriculum”
• “Critical examination of the Olympic Legacies aspired to by the Games organisers – their relevance in the HLST group of subjects and in HE generally”
• “Olympic and Paralympic Research and its implications for curriculum development”

Workshop sessions will provide opportunities to share developmental initiatives in learning, teaching and assessment in which the Games can be used to revitalise the learning experience of students and to engage them with learning. There will also be a display of posters describing further work in this area its impact.

Download the Programme & Booking Form (118kb .doc)

For more information visit the HLST Conference Page.

Special Issue 2011
CALL FOR PAPERS

Sociology and the 2012 Olympic Games

The 2012 London Olympic and Paralympic Games provide an exciting focus for sociological analyses of the personal and public, local and global. The special issue,
to be published in 2011, provides an opportunity to contribute timely reflections on
the sociological interest and significance of this global event in UK and comparative
context. This special issue aims to bring together strong theoretical, empirical and
methodological contributions from across the field of sociology, demonstrating the
ways in which the discipline can use the backdrop of the games to examine sporting,
political, cultural, economic and global events.

Possible themes and topics include the following:

• Nationhood, participation, identity and citizenship
• Cooperation, competition and global politics
• Work, economy and the service sector
• Sociology of sport and the body
• Children and young people
• Leisure and tourism
• Community and city
• Megaprojects and regeneration
• Crime, safety and surveillance
• Sociology of disability
• Sociology of London

The special issue will be edited by Amanda Coffey, Tom Hall, Sally Power and Amanda Robinson. The editors welcome contributions from sociologists working
across the range of interests published in the journal and from those at early stag
of their career as well as those who are more established.

Deadline for submissions: 31 July 2010
Queries to current editors: sociology@cardiff.ac.uk

Submissions will be accepted via http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/soc

Full submission instructions are available on this site on the Instructions and Forms page. Please read these in full before submitting your manuscript.

All manuscripts will be subject to the normal referee process, but potential authors
are welcome to discuss their ideas in advance with the editors.

Sociology is a journal of the British Sociological Association published by its trading subsidiary BSA Publications Ltd

The British Sociological Association is a Registered Charity (no. 1080235) and a Company Limited by Guarantee (no. 3890729).

On 19 May, 2010, the London Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (LOCOG)  launched the Olympic and Paralympic Mascots. Their design is in keeping with London’s pursuit of postmodern iconography, which has created an absence of locative symbols through which outsiders can interpret the 2012 Games. This approach to imaging the Games was most clearly articulated three years ago, with the launch of the logo, which also attracted attention for its avant-garde structure and unique functional property of maintaining its visual integrity even without the Olympic rings (see Miah 2007).

Similarly, the London 2012 mascots are a deliberate retreat from jingoism, cliché and national symbols and, given how LOCOG appears to be imagining London’s Games, one might conclude that the final designs could only have been this way. For while it is common for Olympic mascots to symbolize identity in some way, Britain is a nation absent of a clear identity and so a new alien species seems appropriate, especially in an age of renewed commercial space travel and synthetic biology. However, are they too much of a retreat, do host populations ultimately want their mascots to represent themselves? We’ll be posting an article soon to follow up some of these themes. Stay tuned.

Our latest article is by two of LOCOG’s regional Creative Programmers, Debbi Lander (Northwest) and Richard Crowe (Southwest) who reflect on their impressions of Vancouver, having spent time in the city during the Olympic Games. They emphasize the importance of approaching the Games time project not just as an opportunity to develop a legacy for the nation, but also for the creative sectors involved with building work around the programme. They also consider what presence work from the regions and nations will have in London’s cultural programme during Games time.

The closing date for this year’s competition is 30th June 2010 and all entries will be assessed by a panel of judges before the winners receive £2,000 and the runners up get £1,000. The best essays will also be published by the CIPC and IBE.

The awards will be run every year in the run-up to the London 2012 Games and will be complemented by a series of conferences and debates bringing together prominent individuals from the worlds of academia, sports and business.

To find out more about the awards can be found here and here.

Admission is by donation.

Feb 18 CONTRACT 7pm-9pm

(Updated to add full live stream from 18th of February, via W2 TV)

An Olympic Games raises a number of exciting and challenging questions for a city. It proposes new spheres of investment, the redistribution of funds, inclusion and areas of exclusion, new laws that affect civil life and a vast, global media profile. How do these structures affect the obligations of citizens and institutions who become bound by collaborative contracts? And how does the scrutinization of this work by traditional and new media affect local identity and global perceptions? What can be learned from Vancouver 2010? How can this inform London 2012? How is work by artists contributing to urban city and citizenship development?

Feb 20 COMPETE: Faster, Higher, Stronger 4:30pm-8:30pm

(Updated to add full live stream from 20th of February, via W2 TV)

The Olympic Games are measures of human excellence but what happens when those measures are disrupted by self-augmentation and body modification? Our biological apparatus is in flux, vulnerable, yet re-imagined by technology. What will ability and disability mean in an era of genetically modified athletes and surgically sculpted children? How are artists contributing to this research and debate? For example, genetically screening for ‘perfect pitch’ may produce ideal singers, but whose ideal? Alternatively, what will the integration of future technology within biology mean for how humans communicate with each other via performances (dance, music or sport)?

This does however beg the question of what the true extent and scope of the culture on offer?   What culture is being represented and which cultural organizations are joining in seems impossible at this point to figure out with the multiplicity of cultural programmes taking place, many of which seem to be additional to the official programme of the Cultural Olympiad (which also includes CODE (Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition) and that encompass cultural programmes from the four host nations and the many pavilions. The Cultural Olympiad publicity does not cover or contain all this cultural activity I have come across so far. Decentralised and self organizated cultural activity and programmes is certainly something to be encouraged but as a visitor to the city, unless it is presented as one for the games, it’s tough to make any sense of.

As I walked past the very long early morning queue of people going in to see the Da Vinci exhibition at the Vancouver Art Gallery, I wondered how many of these people were Olympic sports tourists and if they were, why this event was not part of the Cultural Olympiad? Conversely, the excellent NeoGrafik project – a site specific graffiti and projection work – which is a part of the official Cultural Olympiad and a CODE event – did not have any visible brand association to the Cultural Olympiad at the site but neither did it have any audiences.

Granville street on the other hand, fully branded on both sides of the street with Cultural Olympiad banners had a host of street arts interventions and crowds of people playfully engaging with sculptures, installations, objects and street art acts and strollers that lined the streets as part of the life of the city around games time. So, this street was part of the cultural offer too and the sports tourists wandering the streets were taking part in it. Artworks out on the streets seems to benefit from the opportunities that games times brings for making a relationship between culture and sport and both its audiences. One event in particular caught my imagination and made the link between art and sport explicit in an instant. It was a simple art work – a solo street performer standing on a plinth with two tennis racquets in his hands, making small movements and freeze poses in a cycle of movement gestures.

Reflecting on this first day and the delivery structure for culture in the city, I found myself questioning what the role and function of an official Cultural Olympiad was and that maybe it could be enough for a ‘Cultural Olympiad’ to simply be an open platform and brand which invites all cultural organizations, artists and groups operating in the host city and wider to create and promote games time inspired programmes and events? Is there indeed a need for a central programming and curatorial structures and if there is, might it benefit from having a very tight, even singular artistic and legacy focus. Perhaps the Cultural Olympiad in future years could be as simple as an open invitation to all to create something special for the streets – because that is where the sports tourists are and the real audience development opportunity. It is also where many of the world’s journalists are wandering between sports events and one effective way of getting on to their agenda.

Debbi Lander, is the Northwest Creative Programmer for London 2012 and is contributing to Culture @ the Olympics during her time in the city.

Exhibition: World Games: An Exhibition of Painting from Beijing 2008 — London 2012

When: 25-29 November, 2009

Address:

Bankside Gallery

48 Hopton Street London SE1 9JH

Phone 020 7928 7521

Email info@banksidegallery.com

www.banksidegallery.com

More details below: