While the rise of the non-accredited Olympic journalist has expanded the range of coverage of the Olympic program, the growth of social media has transformed the range of locations in which Olympic media content can be found. And although these two trajectories have been independent, they have also been mutually reinforcing. This chapter focuses on the emergence of social media as a new kind of Olympic journalism that is highly reliant on the co-development of content and audience involvement. Yet the crucial determinant of its success is located in a wider crisis within the media industries over legitimacy, authority, and independence. In this respect, it is fitting that the opening ceremony of the 2012 London Games featured the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, and his classic phrase “This is for everyone.” That sentiment helps to explain the power of social media in the syndication of Olympic news.
Since the creation of the Web, there has been a significant amount of change in users’ experiences, but also in how content is moved around digitally. The era of social media is demarcated by the idea of Web 2.0, which was popularized in 2004 via an O’Reilly Net conference to describe a new working ethos around the Web and a redefinition of the technical means by which content could be shared. Though some would argue that the expression Web 2.0 simply denoted a different set of architectural principles for how content is created and moved around the Internet, the idea of an ethos is a more compelling way of making sense of how it differs from Web 1.0. Even the idea of sharing may be evidence of this change in what people expect from media content, moving away from an era in which information is broadcast in a unidirectional manner to a sense in which the content can belong to everyone.
The underlying idea of Web 2.0 defined the era of social media and generated new conversations about what the Web should be doing for people, which included making information more portable, more creative, and more visual. Subsequently, 2.0 would quickly become a metaphor for innovation, alternative ways of thinking, and new forms of human development, drawing on the terminology used to describe new versions of software. Barassi and Trere argue that its popularization was “profoundly influenced by business rhetoric” (2012, p. 1282). Yet its use in the past ten years to describe a paradigm shift in digital design remains useful as a way of thinking about what changed for Web users. Perhaps the most powerful application of the “2.0” era is found in Steve Fuller’s 2013 book Humanity 2.0, which testifies to the changing conditions of human evolution, a theme brought about at least partially by increases in computing power. The term Web 2.0 has flourished as a result of progress in computer technology, the constancy of Moore’s Law, and the ongoing pursuit of Ray Kurzweil’s “singularity”—the moment when the intelligence of computers overtakes that of humans. Though much of the Web 2.0 entrepreneur spirit was only tangentially connected to these broader debates about the development of humanity, it also signaled a radical overhaul of our knowledge economy, emphasizing a way of thinking about communication and social order. For instance, Wikipedia has its roots in the Web 2.0 era—an era defined by the ability for many people to have the role of author and where the idea of collective wisdom replaces individual expertise.
Web 2.0 was a new kind of World Wide Web, distinguished by new forms of publishing, people, places, and processes. These new environments were far superior in their ability to connect people, would ease consumption and production, and would transform how people mobilize digital resources for a range of creative, political, economic, or social uses. The concept of Web 2.0 was also a symbol for a better Web, one more equipped to deal with a burgeoning mobile culture. Yet it was also a place where debates about how intellectual property rights would be marshaled in the future became ever more complex. Websites were now designed around the concepts of syndication, sharing, and re-publishing, and brand identities were easy to hijack on a scale that was previously unimaginable. The only limiting factors were bandwidth and the cost of accessing the Web outside of Wi-Fi range. Some of the best-known platforms emerged around that time, including Facebook and Wordpress, two of the most popular platforms for sharing content across the Web. In the next two years, YouTube and Twitter were launched.
These changes happened around the time of the preparations for the 2006 Torino Games—only ten years after the Atlanta Games, the first Olympic Games to have a website. The consequences of Web 2.0 for Olympic organizers was a vastly expanded publishing and broadcasting community. Moreover, almost overnight a vastly larger population of publics had the means by which to publish their own content. Spectators could record their own Olympic sports content and broadcast it on the Web in real time, albeit illegally. As was noted earlier, Torino 2006 was also the first Games at which the non-accredited media center began to host bloggers. Two years earlier, in Athens, this was not yet possible; now it is hard to imagine an Olympic Games in which news doesn’t circulate through social media.
These changes would quickly set the tone for the Olympic movement’s engagement with its online public, transforming methods of communication and developing new audiences through the growth of social media. By the time of the 2010 Vancouver Games, there were two parallel processes taking place around the uptake of new digital media, both intimately connected to the tools afforded by social media and the new architecture that was Web 2.0. The first of these trends was the growth of user-generated content, the fruit of social-media labor. The second was the growth of citizen journalism, which became increasingly tied to the rise of social-media environments. This chapter deals principally with the former of these trends, the shift in digital communications toward social media—a term that has now become ubiquitous in discussions about the Internet, but which remains essentially contested as a media category. It considers how social media have affected the infrastructure of the Olympic Games, along with the individuals who are essential to its production—officials, athletes, sponsors, and the media outlets that seek to leverage interest in the Games to boost their numbers of viewers, listeners, or readers.
Web 2.0 and social media must be seen as two sides of the same coin. In order for media to be social in the sense implied by the term social media, a set of communication protocols that is qualitatively different from the Web 1.0 version of the Internet is necessary. Thus, Web 2.0 websites were built on extended mark-up language (XML), which was coded in such a way as to enable sharing, re-publishing, and embedding almost infinitely and with minimal labor—sometimes automatically, as may be said of Facebook’s recent Instant Articles initiative. As Sweney (2015) notes,
Currently, mobile readers have to click on a link in their news feed with a wait of more than eight seconds for the article to load in another Web page—a slow experience in the fast-paced Internet world. … The new initiative, called Instant Articles, will see stories run within Facebook that the company says will make for a seamless loading experience 10 times faster than the current system (online).
Among the earliest adopters of Facebook’s Instant Articles were newspapers (including the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Daily Mail) and broadcasters (including NBC News and the BBC). Facebook’s Instant Articles feature exemplifies the principles of the Web 2.0 ethos, which includes allowing content to move around seamlessly for the end user and giving content a life far beyond its primary publisher’s platform. In fact, the Instant Articles by third-party publishers stay within the Facebook environment, which makes it easier for users to scroll through their Facebook feeds more easily. Although the status of Web 2.0 as a distinct paradigm is disputed, its pertinence to the print media and journalism cannot be overstated. Yet the operating architecture of Web 2.0 has been present since the Web 1.0 days, when Amazon, Trip Adviser, and eBay were pioneers of a coming Web 2.0 revolution. Furthermore, its capacity to transform the conditions of digital participation has been questioned in cultural studies. For instance, one of the most contested debates in digital cultural studies concerns whether the proliferation of social-media technologies exacerbates the problematic consequences of consumerism or whether it revitalizes civic life and individual agency. After a decade of social media, it seems reasonable to conclude that they do both. Social media thus offer a way for companies to make their marketing and sales techniques more precise in order to sell users more things, but also offer a way for users to demonstrate their social concerns more effectively.
Considerable rhetoric around Web 2.0 culture draws on the idea that what distinguishes our present media culture is how it has transformed people into prosumers, the antidote to consumer culture and a concept that gives primacy to the way that consumers become part of the means of production—for instance, by contributing to open-source software development or by editing Wikipedia entries. More broadly, digital engagement and participation has shifted from being a process that is largely about distributing content from one to many to a many-to-many configuration. In this new model of communication, the ability of individual narrowcasters to reach large audiences and for their messages to be syndicated across multiple networks is enabled by the long tail of each individual user, which reaches more and more individual hyper-local communities. Each user is a link in the communication chain, which allows ideas to spread. In this respect, Web 2.0 and social media are seen as mechanisms through which individuals can reassert their citizenship as journalists and, perhaps, as social watchdogs.
Admittedly, this kind of rhetoric sounds remarkably similar to the claims made about Web 1.0 in the 1990s, which held up the Internet as the panacea for society. After all, the act of sharing another organization’s content may also be described as a form of emotional labor, an act which has the effect of working for an organization by allowing their intellectual property to be distributed further. In this respect, sharing content on social media is an act of taking part in a large marketing project. Nevertheless, the ease at which it became possible to publish ideas across platforms was a significant change in the Web’s publishing architecture.
One of the biggest differences between Web 1.0 and 2.0 was that creating content in Web 2.0 environments no longer required vast technical knowledge or any training at all. It was no longer necessary to learn a programming language to create websites, nor was it necessary to learn how to design or use file-transfer protocols. Publishing in a Web 2.0 era also required very little knowledge of how to make websites searchable, and no longer was it very difficult to create highly visual content. All these tasks were effectively de-skilled through new social-media platforms, the use of which required little more than the ability to navigate a Web browser. This is not to say that being successful online was devoid of strategy or insights; it is to say that publishing content out into the world had become much simpler. This ease of publishing, along with greater accessibility to the Web, is perhaps the most crucial difference between the two eras.
Yet, despite the expansion of creative freedom that the Web 2.0 era has brought, there is also a sense in which they enslave users to a relatively few large (new) media giants, which are commercially exploiting the free labor that underpins the success of their platforms. For example, when Facebook users update their status, upload content, or search for information, they contribute to the vast database of insight that is subsequently monetized by Facebook. In this sense, the expansion of our sense of freedom is accompanied by the exploitation of our play by organizations that seek to sell us more things by knowing more precisely what we value. Boyle and Haynes draw attention to this when considering soccer in the age of new media. They claim that digital media “marks another staging post on the long road of commercialisation which the media and football industries have been embarked on since their first meeting” (2004, p. 161). Indeed, they argued that this trajectory led to a loss of citizenship, and that the global reach of digital culture was detrimental to more traditional and enduring local connections among soccer fans.
Much about digital culture has changed since Boyle and Haynes published their analysis. The Web 1.0 period was characterized by monopolization of the Web by such giants as Google and Yahoo, which matured in that period. Yet the rise of user-generated content changes the dynamic in various ways and, despite the fact that there remain financial models that allow such new-media giants to maintain their dominant position, the relationship between these companies and the user has changed. A simple example of this is found in the way that somebody is, in a Web 2.0 era, able to use freely available platforms to publish content in a variety of forms, where Web 1.0 was much more reliant on the purchase of software and space online to be a competent website publisher. The existence of Google and similar companies has brought about the demise of companies whose software only a few people could afford. Even the creative tools provided by Adobe—which have been industry standards for some time—are now available by a subscription rather than for one one-time payment, which allows customers to always have the latest version of software and to pay less per year. The considerable implications of Web 2.0 for the Olympic movement have been demonstrated by the plethora of Olympic digital artifacts available today. With Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Snapchat generating new communities that bypass the need for Google’s search facility, even the dominance of Google is now in question.
A wider ability to produce Olympic media content across new platforms brought with it the possibility of engaging audiences differently, rather than just treating them as spectators or viewers of content. Yet it also enabled more people to re-purpose material in ways that may be considered as a breach intellectual property laws. For instance, a spectator at an Olympic event who took a close-up video of an athlete receiving a medal at the Games and then uploaded it to YouTube would be in breach of conditions specified on his or her ticket. Yet it is plausible that many spectators would neither know nor care about this infringement, and indeed that they might not even perceive the act as an infringement. Indeed, one may ask whether it would really matter if someone did this, were it not for the fact that the content may spread to locations beyond those they had intended. These kinds of challenges became more urgent in a Web 2.0 era—in part because, even if the user does not make money, one can argue that the value is derived by the platform, which hosts the content. The platform draws the attention of new viewers and may even be able to monetize space around the content, through advertising. However, it is far from clear that such acts would threaten the Olympic Games. After all, the International Olympic Committee has increased its income throughout the Web 2.0 period. Rather than diminish television viewing, social media seem to encourage more of it. This supports the claim that, far from challenging old systems and bringing radical change, new media help to reinforce established capitalist tendencies within elite sport (Dart 2012). Yet the IOC has sought to differentiate what happens in social media from other media environments, as the next section explains.
The IOC’s first “blogging guidelines” for “accredited persons”1 were released in February 2008 and were an attempt to ensure control over the distribution of media content about the Games. (See International Olympic Committee 2008.) The rationale for such guidelines has been much debated, but their purpose is broadly to protect Olympic stakeholders’ interests, either by directing accredited persons away from unknowingly publishing content on unauthorized commercial sites or by prohibiting “ambush marketing” (that is, willful exploitation of a private contractual relationship that might undermine the exclusive association rights of the official Olympic partners).
Ambush marketing has become commonplace at the Games. For instance, in 1992 the American basketball player Michael Jordan famously covered up the logo of his team’s sponsor, Reebok, when receiving his medal, so as to not compromise his personal sponsorship contract with Nike. In this sense, the blogging guidelines extend the protection of the Olympic brand assets, which underpin the financial viability of the Games. However, the Web 2.0 version of ambush marketing is rather more nuanced, as Nick Symmonds’ Twitter tattoo demonstrates. More will be said later about how ambush marketing takes place in a Web 2.0 era. First, I want to focus in more detail on the IOC blogging guidelines, since they influence the conditions of Olympic social-media life.
There are various aspects of the IOC’s 2008 blogging guidelines that are relevant to consider when attempting to understand how Olympic media content is overseen by the Olympic industry. I use the word industry here to refer to the totality of the Olympic stakeholders—not just what the IOC designates as its Olympic Family, but the range of actors who are legally invested in the Olympic interests and who have a stake in maintaining brand exclusivity. When comparing the initial blogging guidelines with the 2012 version, there are important differences that reveal how the cultural value associated with social media has increased. According to the IOC’s 2008 blogging guidelines, blogging is “a legitimate form of personal expression and not … a form of journalism.” The guidelines go on to outline a series of conditions that were intended to guide the activities of accredited persons at the Games. The decision to regard blogging as a form of personal expression, rather than journalism, is the primary reason to interpret the guidelines as reasonably liberal rather than deliberately restrictive.2 Though this view may be challenged by staunch supporters of Web freedom, there are contextual reasons to reinforce this interpretation of the guidelines.
The first reason is that the guidelines apply only to people who have entered into a contractual relationship with the IOC, either personally or indirectly through an organization that has such a relationship. This category encompasses athletes, officials, coaches, and, generally, anyone with official Olympic accreditation. The guidelines do not attempt to restrict the blogging freedom of the general public or how people may seek to publish content online. An Olympic ticket holder who endeavors to commercialize media content from the spectator experience, or even to upload sport footage to a free platform, will find that the small print on his or her ticket states a similar restriction. For instance, tickets to the 2012 London Games stated among the terms and conditions of ticket purchase the following:
You agree that any images, videos, or sound recordings of the Games taken by you may only be used for private and domestic purposes and cannot be used for any commercial purposes, whether on the Internet or otherwise.
Such conditions are consistent with what takes place at other cultural events—such as filming in cinemas or at concerts, so one ought not get too carried away with claiming them to be unreasonable impositions. Nevertheless, social media test the limits of these stipulations, since it isn’t clear whether uploading a photo of a playing field to a free publishing platform constitutes a breach of them. After all, while the platform may be free, the content is still located within a commercial space. It would have been far more restrictive if the IOC had defined blogging as a form of journalism, since the IOC’s contractual relationships with broadcasters required it to monitor Olympic journalism.
Second, there is reason to presume that the IOC seeks to distinguish between the professional practice of journalism and the kinds of reporting activities that the general public may undertake. The latter are not subject to the kinds of expectations of professional journalism. For example, professional journalists are expected to maintain a certain code of ethics in the conduct of journalism, but the general public is not (even if it should). Of course, the salience of this distinction is at the heart of the debate about how media culture is changing. In recent years, criticisms of journalists’ ethics and evidence of critical, responsible journalism by citizens raises questions about whether the two are becoming more closely aligned—in some instances, citizen journalists show more ethical concern and awareness than professional journalists. Yet in the context of the Olympics, it is still unclear what counts as either journalism or some other kind of news syndication.
Consider an athlete who has taken a video camera or a mobile phone to the closing ceremony of the 2012 London Games and live-streamed what he was seeing directly to a free-to-use commercial platform that had no rights associated with the Games. Such an act would have violated the IOC’s guidelines in two ways. First, it would have been reasonable to argue that the athlete was making a personal diary of his experience and so would have been within the scope of what the IOC permitted. However, if the athlete’s camera had captured something controversial, the footage might have created a whirlwind of media attention and, by implication, would have become material for journalism. Even in the absence of any controversy, the eye-level view of an athlete in the stadium among all the stars could have been exploited as premium media content, perhaps capturing more interest than images caught by rights-holding cameras, which would have been much farther from what was happening in the stadium. Second, commercial conflicts may have arisen as a result of such posts. Even if the platform used by the athlete had been free and, therefore, there would have been no commercial exchange between the athlete and the website, its existence would have been underpinned by a financial model—someone or some company would have been accumulating value in kind or in cash as a result of traffic generated by the content.
Thus, even publishing to free-to-use platforms presents a challenge for the IOC, which in the hypothetical case mentioned above would have had contracts for online content with a primary media partner. Moreover, a free platform used through the athlete’s personal account might have had substantial non-Olympic advertising, which would have conflicted with IOC contracts. During the 2012 London Games, projects associated with the Cultural Olympiad uploaded content to their own YouTube channels, the videos of which were preceded by commercials determined by YouTube rather than the IOC. Such commercial associations have, as yet, no relationship to the IOC marketing model and thus may be described as a passive form of ambush marketing.
The IOC’s 2012 blogging guidelines were similar to its 2008 guidelines in that two of the main concerns were brand protection and ensuring that any video footage from Olympic sports would not be transmitted by unauthorized accredited persons. Yet there were also some big differences. The 2012 guidelines began by emphasizing the importance of social-media freedom. Furthermore, a desire to distinguish between diary-like personal blogging and journalism was evident in the following passage:
The IOC encourages participants and other accredited persons to post comments on social media platforms or websites and tweet during the Olympic Games, and it is entirely acceptable for a participant or any other accredited person to do a personal posting, blog or tweet. However, any such postings, blogs or tweets should be in a first-person, diary-type format and should not be in the role of a journalist—i.e. they must not report on competition or comment on the activities of other participants or accredited persons, or disclose any information which is confidential or private in relation to any other person or organisation. A tweet is regarded in this respect as a short blog and the same guidelines are in effect, again, in first-person, diary-type format. (International Olympic Committee 2012)
The elevation of the third person as the mode by which journalism distinguishes its professionalism may seem simplistic—many forms of journalism are written in the first person. However, this seems to be the principle distinction between reporting and making a diary, as articulated by the guidelines. Yet there remain a number of cases in which the ambiguity of these guidelines could lead to situations of uncertainty. For instance, if an athlete posted a link to her main sponsors’ website from a tweet in their personal Twitter account, would this be considered a breach of the guidelines, even if that tweet did not reference the Olympics? In short, do the social-media identities of all athletes become Olympic property during the Games period, or would only communications pertaining to the Olympics be covered by the guidelines? A new explanation is offered in the answers to frequently asked questions about the Rio 2016 guidelines:
As a principle, accredited persons should only use social media during the period of the Games for the purposes of sharing their experiences and communicating with their friends, family and supporters and not for commercial and/or advertising purposes. Accredited persons may only post about their sponsors, promote any brand, product or service on social or digital media or otherwise use social and digital media in a manner that creates or implies any association between the Games or the IOC and a third party, or its products and services, if they have obtained the prior written approval of the IOC or their National Olympic Committee. (International Olympic Committee 2015a)
Effectively, the IOC would seem to require that athletes think of themselves as ambassadors for the Olympic movement in everything they do during the Olympic Games period, rather than to use this period as an opportunity to advance their individual financial interests. Though the IOC may not be able to restrict such expressions legally—beyond what is covered in the Olympic Charter—the guidelines indicate that athletes are morally bound to limiting their positioning other commercial interests during the Games. While this may seem excessively restrictive, it also seems reasonable to claim that the attention afforded to any Olympic athlete during the Games is a consequence of an athlete’s being a part of the Games and thus that any activity that undermines the Games’ brand would be in conflict with that agreement, even if the content was generated outside of the Olympic venues. When comparing the 2014 and 2016 guidelines, there is a shift from a policy under which athletes are forbidden from posting commercial links to sponsors to a situation in which they must obtain the IOC’s approval before doing so, suggesting more freedom to negotiate such interests.
The guidelines for the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games make additional, important modifications to those for the 2012 London Games. For instance, during Rio 2016 certain areas of the Olympic Village are designated “no picture areas” to allow athletes some privacy—a practice that was introduced at Sochi in 2014. The revised guidelines maintain a clear distinction between freedom to post still photography versus audio or video content, the latter of which is much more restricted to personal use and no sharing on social media. A final, minor but revealing shift in the guidelines from their conception to the latest version is a shift in language from simply “blogging guidelines” to “social and digital media guidelines,” suggesting further how the range of digital communications has expanded over the years.
When wrestling with the complexity of these cases, it is important not to conclude that social media are exceptional, as many such potential breaches could arise through other forms of activity. For instance, if an Olympic champion thanks a non-Olympic personal sponsor when being interviewed by an Olympic broadcaster, they may have made similar breaches of guidelines. Again, looking at the case of Nick Symmonds and his Twitter tattoo sponsor, it is difficult to conclude what kind of objections might surround such an act. In this case, the auction winner would have its Twitter account tattooed on the athlete’s arm in return for sponsorship to the amount of the winning bid. The implication of this proposal is that the exposure of the Twitter account via the athlete’s body would provide valuable advertising space for the auction’s winner. Yet the case was something of a red herring in terms of testing the limits of Olympic ambush marketing, as the athlete admitted that he would be required to cover up the tattoo during any Olympic races because it would be seen as a form of unauthorized advertising. Nevertheless, Symmonds notes that covering up the tattoo with tape each time he runs is a reminder for audiences of the rules that restrict athletes from securing their own sponsorship deals), an act that alludes to Naomi Klein’s “No Logo” thesis. Such a novel example of how social media may change the monetary relationships between athletes and the sports industries shows how complex the management of a brand has become in the era of social media. It also alludes to a future in which every part of an athlete’s body can be monetized with digital advertising.
Despite the benefits of the IOC’s definition of blogging as personal expression rather than journalism, this interpretation of what people do online is at odds with the varied cultural meanings attached to online content generation and neglects to consider the fluidity of how media content may shift from one place to another and have different cultural and political meanings over time. In other words, previously one might have treated journalism on the basis of the fixed end products it generates. However, today, those end products are dynamic and always unfinished, and so the labels we attach to them, or the work they do, may shift from being either journalism or personal expression. The original guidelines also subsumed all forms of digital content production under the definition of blogging, which itself may be a term that inadequately describes what people do when posting content to social-media platforms. Finally, the guidelines may not adequately account for how professional journalists have begun to occupy social-media environments.
Thus, it remains doubtful as to whether the IOC—or anyone for that matter—is in a position to come to terms with the transformation of journalism and social communication that is brought about by social media. Resolving some of these issues requires understanding how society regards blogging, but also needs an understanding of how the spaces within which journalism takes place, along with the communities that produce them, are changing. What occurs within social-media platforms may have any number of meanings. Certainly, with the capacity of Web 2.0 to permit the endless sharing of content, one’s blogging feed becomes just a single component in a wider ecosystem of journalistic writing. It is already commonplace for professional journalists to use individuals’ tweets from Twitter as a source for reports, a mode of journalism that has caused some people to be very cautious about what they say in such a platform. Furthermore, many media outlets draw on user-generated content in their creation of stories and in the discovery of emerging stories, as the rise of Storify attests. Storify is a social-media platform that allows its users to curate content from a range of sources and pull it into a single stream.
Thus, beyond audience members’ undertaking their own journalistic work, one of the distinguishing features of the social-media era of journalism is that audiences play a more active role in constituting the practice than was previously the case. For example, if a Twitter user follows the BBC Twitter account and then re-tweets content published by the BBC, then they become an integral part of the BBC’s production line by further disseminating its work to more viewers. In this case, the Twitter user’s role is to amplify, rather than to take part in the BBC’s investigative process. However, if a BBC journalist is following a Twitter user and something the user tweets becomes a lead for a story and the journalist and the Twitter user engage with each other about the issue, then the user may become interwoven with the journalist’s own work process. In this case it is clearer how social media may be more comparable to a journalist’s picking up a lead through conversations out in the field than to just being a personal diary. Yet the ambiguity of the example reveals how society and the media are in tension when attempting to wrestle with the value and the meaning of what happens in social-media environments.
The example also calls into question the legitimacy of creating rules to govern online activity—a task that may be akin to having a set of guidelines to underpin interactions in everyday social spaces. Certainly there are social norms and laws that may inform what people do within social worlds, but rarely is there a need for written guidelines to ensure reasonable conduct. Moreover, the practicality of enforcing rules in a fast-moving online world may have little practical value. If athletes are required to seek advice from the IOC on whether or not they can re-tweet something before doing so, then the currency of social media will be lost, since the currency of social media relies on the capacity to communicate the real-time live experience. Again, this raises the question as to whether use of social media can be overseen by guidelines at all, or whether top-heavy guidelines only jeopardize its value. However, as with many guidelines, the breach of rules need not mean that the International Olympic Committee or a National Olympic Committee pursues an athlete for failing to adhere to them in all cases.
In this context, a wiser approach to interpreting the IOC’s Blogging Guidelines would be to conclude that they are designed to protect the IOC from systematic attempts to exploit IOC property. On this interpretation, sanctions are likely to be directed only toward those individuals or organizations who have made concerted efforts to use platforms in such a way as to advance their commercial interests. It is more likely to be these large-scale infringements that attract the interest of the IOC, rather than individual athletes undertaking minor actions. Indeed, in some environments, infringements by spectators can be addressed subsequently, rather than needing rules that prevent actions. For example, if an Olympic fan films the television coverage of the Games and then uploads that video to YouTube, then it is possible for YouTube to identify that content by using audio visual content tracking and to either remove it or monetize it with commercials. These identifiers now offers more opportunities for organizations to adopt multiple strategies in response to infringements, rather than simply seek to take legal action.
In the same year that the IOC published its initial blogging guidelines, the British Olympic Association published similar guidelines for its athletes, which stated the following:
Online Diaries (BLOGS)—Athletes may not submit journals or on-line diaries to Web sites during the actual Games Period as this is deemed to be similar to reporting from the Games which is not permissible under the Olympic Charter. Athletes and any other accredited participants are free, of course, to respond to questions from journalists, Web editors, or the public, on any site in an ad hoc fashion. (British Olympic Association 2007)
These 2008 guidelines were met with widespread criticism within the UK, as they were seen as even more restrictive than the IOC’s—perhaps even contradicting them. However, the reason for this controversy is only partially explained by focusing on concerns about individual liberties. Rather, the British Olympic Association was especially concerned about how athletes might be exploited in relation to the political issues facing China’s first Games, which took place amid international criticism. This generous defense of the BOA guidelines is challenged by those who argue that they were actually designed to limit athlete’s freedoms, an ongoing concern about how athletes may operate when accepting their contract to represent Great Britain in the Olympic Games. On this matter, it is important to consider the way in which the IOC steers the Olympic program away from partisan political issues in order to preserve what it considers to be the apolitical space of the Olympic program.
These debates reveal how journalism is expanding practice in a digital era, a phenomenon which is creating new questions about what journalism entails, how it is distinguished, and how it should be regulated. The tensions they provoke are played out at the Olympic Games, where the media are steadily being challenged by new communities of journalism with a range of political interests. A number of questions arise from this tension. For instance, YouTube, Facebook, and similar platforms become the primary environments on which audiences share what is happening in the Olympic city. They are not simply another channel that we watch, but are completely new ecosystems of information. They are also the places where people go online to find content. Alternatively, will these environments be more free and open than the traditional, accredited media spaces? As more and more individuals regard themselves as citizen journalists, might one expect a new kind of media coverage to surround the Games? Are professional journalists under threat by such communities? Will journalism at the Olympics be conveyed via blogs and podcasts rather than by television? The following section considers some of these questions by investigating how the Olympic bodies might monetize the user-generated content of social-media platforms to maintain their position as owners of all media content associated with the Olympic Games.
A decisive influencer in the ongoing expansion of media artifacts at the Olympics is the IOC’s capacity to monetize content within new media environments. Yet, while analysis of the Games often focuses on the sports, the key component of this discussion has more to do with the Olympic experience as a period of seven years leading up to the Games. In short, figuring out how to make the most of the time in between Games provides the most compelling way for the IOC to maintain control of its assets.
Historically, the principal concern in terms of the monetization of Olympic content has been control of the IOC’s main identity, the Olympic rings. Games after Games have been replete with stories of breaches of Olympic intellectual property and their perpetrators’ being pursued by the IOC, by the Organizing Committee, or by the National Olympic Committee. Examples include retail outlets that have created their own Olympics-inspired window displays have been forced to remove them. Indeed, before the 2012 London Games a butcher in England was required to take down a display of sausages shaped like the Olympic rings, which caused the former Head of the IOC’s marketing guidelines, Michael Payne, to say that the rules were “never intended to shut down the flower shop that put its flowers in Olympic rings in the window, or the local butcher who has put out his meat in an Olympic display.” “The public do get it,” he continued. “They do understand that Coca-Cola has paid, Pepsi hasn’t, so Coca-Cola should be entitled to provide the soft drinks, but what’s that got to do with a flaming torch baguette in a café?” (Payne is quoted in Peck 2012.)
The incidents mentioned above may illustrate the lengths to which the IOC and Olympic stakeholders will go to curtail trademark breaches, but they also suggest that similar breaches online—even if minor—could be subject to similar legal action. Some recent examples of breaches that fall into the category of ambush marketing include the URL http://www.london2012festival.com, which, instead of taking browsers to the London 2012 Festival (the main Games-time Cultural Olympiad brand for the 2012 London Games) took them to a website selling mobile homes. And shortly after Rio de Janeiro won the 2016 bid, the URL www.rio2015.com led to a website with a two-frame layout; in the smaller frame was a rogue advertising banner, and in the main frame there was an embedded mirror of the official Rio 2016 website. The website is no longer active.
Whether or not organizing committees or National Olympic Committees pursue all such breaches the Internet presents new cases that test established precedents. In all cases, the key question for the IOC is whether to protect its interests by pursuing all such breaches or by making examples of some so as to deter further infringements. Alternatively, it may seek to ensure that any Olympic content is subject to the interests of the IOC and for digital technology. Monetization rather than censorship may be the most effective and efficient way to achieve that. Indeed, such strategies are already apparent within social-media environments. For instance, the IOC may seek to ensure that videos on YouTube tagged “Olympic” are preceded by an Olympic-sponsor video. This may prove to be a more effective way of monetizing content than having a strict “take down” policy.
The financial model of recently successful Web ventures mostly relies on two principles. The first has to do with the generation of marketing data, which may then be sold to third parties to assist with the advertisement of products or services, either within or outside of cyberspace. The second (a more recent principle) relies on the free utilization of services by a large consumer base complemented by a comparatively small number of users who pay for advanced services. A good example of this “freemium” model of e-commerce is Google, which utilizes data gathered from its search facility to sell such services as Google Analytics to organizations that are interested in tracking their profile online with a view to improving their impact. Many other start-up companies, including Flickr, YouTube, and Prezi, have adopted a similar model. That model functions on a simple logic: If the product or service is good enough, then its adoption by a mass audience will give rise to communities of premium users, and those communities will support the development of the software. Moreover, the open-source varieties of such software furnish companies with a large community of developers who will work without pay to improve the application because they value and care about the product. The monetization of the Olympic movement’s digital assets may, then, draw first on the pre-Games period, during which millions of clicks will occur in search of Olympic content, which could then become an integral part of the IOC’s rights package. (In order for this to happen, it may first be necessary for the IOC to gain sponsorship from a large online media provider, such as Google.)
These aspects of the monetization problem offer important insights into the context of the adoption of social media within the Olympics, though it would be more interesting to consider how open-source media communities fit within a climate in which social media promote the retention of power and control. There are specific issues that are at stake when considering this subject in the context of the Olympic movement; they have to do with how the Olympic movement expresses its social and humanitarian goals. In some cases, the monetization of digital media is in conflict with the Olympic movement’s constitution and the ethos of digital culture. Treating social-media assets as part of the corporate marketing of an Olympic organization is inextricable from this monetization approach. Yet many of the Olympic stakeholders undertake such actions in how they use social media, as the next chapter will discuss in the context of London 2012.
One of the disputes about how to handle social media within the Olympic ecosystem concerns whether or not the drive toward greater openness brings some risks to those who previously had sole control of the communication channels. There are two components to the risk that may be brought by such openness, the first of which concerns risks associated with controlling one’s narrative and the second of which has to do with risks to one’s economic foundation. The two may be closely related. In the case of the Olympic Games, loss of exclusivity in the communication of content by the rights holders can diminish their desire to invest into spending large amounts of money for such privileges. Alternatively, an inability to control the main campaign messages that are produced alongside the Games may make the Olympic Games less appealing to utilize as a communication channel.
The IOC has undergone a number of transformations to its management of the media that have worked toward mitigating these risks. At this point, it seems more apparent that openness of media reinforces the capacity of a holder of intellectual property to advance its interests, but it is also clear that openness brings new challenges and calls for new ways of working. Consider one simple principle that distinguishes social media from other modes of communication: that of user-generated content. Never before has an individual had such capacity to destabilize the information hierarchy as has been made possible by the generation of user content. Today a dynamic personal website can be more powerful than a static institutional domain in terms of recall by means of a search engine such as Google.
This challenge to institutions is real, but it exists regardless of whether or not an institution makes its communication channels social. Indeed, an organization is more likely to lose its authority over its brand’s identity if it resists embracing the sharing economy. Failing to adapt to the manner in which communications occur in public spaces rather than private channels entails a loss of opportunity to assert one’s voice. However, the more persuasive argument for opening up media channels to contributions made via social media involves taking into account how Internet users migrate from one platform to another. Thus, if an institution or an organization is not present in a major social-media environment such as Facebook, it will reduce its contact time with its Internet audience, simply because that is where the audience experience online takes place. This is evident from the number of user-generated “groups” dedicated to the Olympics that can be found in such environments.
These aspects of social media reveal why it is risky for an organization to fail to adapt to the changing digital sphere. Moreover, without a strategic approach towards new digital platforms, detachment from one’s audience and community, as it develops within such spaces. This is not to underestimate the dramatic implications of such a shift for institutions such as the IOC. Indeed, for any large, transnational organization, developing an adoption strategy that does not jeopardize the effectiveness of existing contractual arrangements is challenging. Yet there are even more reasons why it is important to pursue an experimental approach to using social media. After all, as revenues from new media increase, the Olympic proposition may become less attractive if it fails to come packaged with new-media rights. It may be increasingly difficult for the IOC to retain global sponsors if it fails to stimulate innovation in this area. Indeed, there are good reasons to believe that the IOC understands this, as the Olympic Channel suggests.
Trusting the social-media community is a crucial part of this process, and various Olympic moments have revealed that it is possible to relinquish control of the communication channel without compromising on strategic ambitions. A good example of this was provided by the dress rehearsals of the London 2012 opening ceremony. Such rehearsals run the risk that highly guarded content might be made public if someone shares photos or videos of them on social media. There is very little that the organizers can do to prevent this, and so they must rely on trust between organizer and audience. To encourage such trust, the London Organizing Committee used digital screens within the venue to ask the live audience to “Save the Surprise.” They also used the Twitter hashtag #savethesurprise. This dual message led to thousands of tweets in which people shared jokes about the ceremony based not on the actual content but on what people who were not there might imagine it to include. In this case, Twitter was used as a vehicle for entertaining, not informing, and that discourse became part of the Games narrative.
As was suggested above, the monetization of Olympic assets is likely to have value particularly for the non-sporting aspects of the Games, partly since there is a lot more flexibility in what publishers can do with these aspects of the Games. This includes the cultural activities, the street environments, and the large fan zones, along with what happens in between the Games. Whereas the sports events are relatively fixed in terms of their format and the contractual relationships around their production, everything that happens outside of the venues is much more varied. However, it does require a change in approach to the Games, from thinking of them as just sports events, to thinking of them as cultural festivals. Indeed, there are various indications that suggest sports mega-events are becoming treated in such a manner by host cities and examples of innovative ways in which digital media is maximizing the exploitation of such interests. There are also various layers to this proposition, but let us first consider three types of digital assets: Cultural Olympiads such as the Vancouver Cultural Olympiad Digital Edition CODE), Facebook groups, and Twitter accounts and feeds.
The Cultural Olympiad (CO) is a special case with regard to monetization. Traditionally operating outside of the core brand identity, the CO has a history of struggling with the intellectual-property arrangements required by the IOC. Even ownership of photographs becomes an issue of concern, particularly when they are shared online. There are some obvious examples of how conflicts arise around the branding of culture generally, but what specific concerns may emerge about a digital cultural artifact? A good template for these considerations is found in the Vancouver 2010 CODE project. Internet users—mostly Canada based—were asked to upload a photograph that conveyed their understanding of “Canada” to others. Thousands of photos were uploaded, curated, and then presented and using a website design that placed the images randomly within the CODE website. Once uploaded, these photographs became the property of the organizing committee. This was an unusual transference of intellectual property in a world where Creative Commons licensing has led to the responsible sharing of intellectual property between individuals and organizations. A crucial facet of the project was the role of curation, although moderation may be a more appropriate word. After all, Vancouver’s Games—much like others—involved considerable protesting by disaffected local communities whose images were absent from this digital celebration of Canada. One reason why an official Olympic digital asset cannot yet fulfill its social role as a space of social media has to do with the compromise brought about by the need for the content to align with a set of Olympic values. In this case, the contractual obligations behind the Cultural Olympiad—which the government of the host city agreed to when signing the contract with the IOC to protect the Olympic brand—restrict the kinds of content that can be elevated. In this moment of Olympic celebration, the host city willingly relinquishes some of its freedom to permit the demonstration of political views, insofar as they run counter to the Olympic values.
A second example is a Facebook group. Facebook is interesting to study in the context of the Olympics, because of the fluidity of how intellectual property is managed. For example, if a Facebook user uploads a video including some content that is owned by someone else, Facebook will endeavor to identify this and prohibit its publication. However, it may be possible create a group or a page that uses the graphical emblems of another organization, even though this may also be a breach of intellectual property. For example, in 2008, when a decision on the site of the 2016 Games was to be made, there were numerous “support” pages for Chicago’s bid. One of them was managed by the bid organization, but many others that were not managed by that organization used protected emblems when promoting their page.
The ability to take such action and not suffer some kind of legal response from Olympic organizers may have something to do with Facebook’s ambiguous public-private status. After all, only members of Facebook could see the infringed content, and so technically, it occurs within a private space—which is not subject to the same kinds of restrictions. Yet to the extent that a large proportion of the population is now present in Facebook, it may no longer make sense to talk of it as a private location. Indeed, in 2013 Facebook’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, pronounced privacy “dead.” This has particular resonance given the way that Facebook has opened up more of its content to public viewing in recent years, a process that has resulted in considerable controversy as a result of its implications of failing to recognize the privacy of users who had signed up for a private space rather than a public environment.
Monetization in these social-media platforms occurs on numerous levels and in different ways. Through Twitter, an Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games (OCOG) can draw its audience to content that it prescribes. It may even permit sponsors to tweet content on an agreed and automated basis, which provides even further opportunity to amplify the sponsors’ brand recall. Facebook’s AdSense technology ensures that sponsors obtain benefit, while the content management capabilities of the application could easily permit the sharing of film and image content by sponsors, thus furthering the IOC’s reach.
With regard to a digital asset such as CODE, the fact that the technology emerges from the OCOG’s new-media infrastructure ensures that intellectual property is retained, but its not being located within a public social-media platform limits the content’s reach considerably. Furthermore, these circumstances deem that the content will have nearly no legacy, since it will be tied to the OCOG’s website infrastructure, which will also be compromised when the OCOG ceases to exist. Though any specific initiative can be archived in digital form, this alone does not ensure that it has a meaningful legacy once the Games have concluded. And yet the entire conversation about the value of an archive in an era of social media has become highly complicated. After all, one of the most successful social-media platforms is Snapchat, which focuses on delivering content that it will delete after a short period of time. Historically, this has enormous implications since it invites us to consider the impact of a world in which what is shared through communication becomes untraceable in the future. The loss of history that is brought by this structure is significant, but thirty years ago the potential for such dialogues to be history did not exist. In this sense, Snapchat’s approach may resonate more with the concerns that too much of our lives is archived and that there is value in resisting this compulsion. After all, the endpoint of continuous recording of our lives is an inability to reflect on what we are doing—already the amount of content we generate in film and image exceeds our capacity to even look back over the content once it is created. In a world in which content generation is continuous, this loss of reflection is even greater.
What are the enduring features of these case studies that may assist studies of digital culture in the future? Are there trends that indicate emerging ways of thinking about our relationship to communities, brands, and products? Alternatively, are any attempts at analyses likely to be redundant within two or three years, once new platforms have emerged? How will the major social-media platforms look ten years from now? Will Facebook still exist? Will YouTube? Will Twitter? In advance of the 2016 Rio de Janeiro Games, NBC Olympics had already indicated that they would utilize Snapchat as a principal communication medium, where previously they had focused on Twitter. Indeed, many young people already have switched from Facebook to Snapchat and Whatsapp, which allow one-to-one private chat, and the currency of public sharing may be in decline. NBC has had a long history of innovating within social media, and its having paid for the rights to broadcast the Games in the United States until 2032 requires it to stay abreast of new digital trends. In the end, switching strategic ambitions to the particular platform that is in vogue at the time may be the smartest approach to take with social media. Such an approach also has the added value of being seen as innovative.
What seems clear about the future of mega-events such as the Olympic Games is that the venues are just one component in a wider festival experience that is being developed and played out in other spaces, whether these are simply outside the arenas or online in social-media platforms. In each case, the way in which an event is conceptualized and produced must change, taking into account the number of remote participants who may be physically close to but who are outside of the official venue zone. Hosts of future Games will have to find ways to optimize the feeling of participation by both kinds of community. In this regard, the most compelling propositions are focused on creating a synergy between the physical world and the digital experience. Twitter and similar platforms have transformed how people access information or news, but also because they are utilized especially as mobile platforms. By this I do not mean just that they are used on mobile phones; I mean that, whereas being online once meant being indoors, behind a computer, it now means being outdoors, on the move, traversing physical space with a digital interface.
There is a lot of commonality between the traditional Olympic volunteer ethos and the community of content generators that are found online. Investigating this commonality can be of considerable value. One of the clear manifestations of the symbolic capital generated by the Olympic Movement is found in people’s willingness to volunteer to help produce the event. (Summer Games require about 70,000 volunteers.) Indeed, understanding what leads people to spend their time undertaking such work may provide helpful insights into what kinds of things users of social media would be willing to do in support of an event they care about. What if, instead of being developed, managed and owned by the IOC, they were developed, managed, and owned by the volunteers, or by a new community of volunteers?
There are various positive consequences that could result from such a shift in how digital development takes place within the Olympic community, though it is useful first to understand how this principle is integral to the economic proposition of some of the most successful software applications of recent years. Consider Wordpress, a popular tool for publishing on the World Wide Web. Wordpress makes it possible for developers to integrate their own design qualities via software “plug-ins”—short pieces of code that Wordpress can integrate to affect the overall functionality of the core template. This model has allowed Wordpress to become one of the main market leaders in Web publishing. It is not used only by bloggers; even the website of the magazine Time is powered by Wordpress.
Increasingly, companies are opening up their software for development by third parties through Software Development Kits (SDKs), and this is seen as a way of brining new innovation to platforms and allowing them to operate in different scenarios. Olympic audiences can be empowered through such change, which allow them to play a more crucial role in shaping the Olympic program.
The Olympic industry is distinguished from other such events by its ideological constitution, the Olympic Charter, which highlights its broad humanitarian aspirations. The mechanisms through which these aspirations may be advanced should be of direct concern to the IOC, particularly in a period of media change. Traditional media are in a time of crisis, brought about in part by the proliferation of user-generated content and the appropriation of journalistic values and methods by citizens. Newspapers have fewer and fewer readers. Television is operated by monopolies. Even the practice of journalism is under threat by a wider proliferation of information by citizens. For this reason, the IOC’s relationship with its media stakeholders requires re-definition, so as to find a model that works in this changing climate.
By emphasizing social media and user-generated content, the IOC can re-energize its audiences, which may have become disenchanted with the IOC’s overly commercial and proprietary model. Indeed, the activity operating around the IOC’s social-media campaigns is indicative of this. However, the broader point about this need for a shift concerns changing patterns of labor in a digital era, which changes what we regard as the institution and its public. In other words, in a world where the majority of the content around an Olympic Games is generated by the public, rather than the event’s legal owner, societies are forced to consider the legitimacy of such private ownership. This is why digital technologies should be understood as activist devices: They can change the conditions of how institutions relate to individuals, or how the governors related to the governed. The politics of such activism need not be anarchic or even opposed to dominant forces in society, but they should always be built on the premise that audiences are both producers and consumers of social artifacts, like the Olympic Games. Though the rhetoric of such circumstances has been a driving principle of media production for several years, it has rarely led to transference of power toward the audience.
If the empowerment of stakeholders or the participatory community isn’t enough to encourage a change in operations, the ability to develop market share may be sufficient. The concept of market share is not easy to apply to an Olympic Games, though a reasonable set of indicators arises from the concept of television audiences. Again, this concept has a different currency in a digital era in which the units of “clickthroughs” or “shares” may surpass or at least complement page or channel viewing figures. Today, the idea of “age views” is also a growing measure of online impact. Yet when working with an audience as a development community, the opportunity to advance page views grows exponentially. This is partly to do with how development works online. By building a development community around a product, it is possible to transform audiences into a critical mass of brand ambassadors whose labor becomes an integral part of the brand’s evolution. Kücklich (2005) describes such a process as “playbour,” arguing that the “relationship between work and play is changing” in such contexts, the effect of which is to re-inscribe “the consumer in to the production process” (Kline et al. 2003, p. 57).
The ability of an independent organization to undertake such a feat without public mobilization is limited because the success of any such enterprise relies, increasingly, on the labor of many hundreds or thousands of participants, which a company cannot expect to staff independently. Another example of the model is Twitter. Since its inception, Twitter has steadily been appropriated by the news media, leading to changes in how they distribute news. The dominance of the mass media within Twitter is also important to acknowledge, not least because it brings into question whether the rise of new media brings about any change within society at all. After all, many of the top Twitter accounts are owned by mass-media organizations. This is true of other social-media platforms too. For example, data from January 2016 shows that the most shared content on Facebook belongs mostly to traditional media outlets such as Fox News, the New York Times, NBC, the Guardian and the BBC (Corcoran 2016). All of this suggests that social media function as a new medium rather than a new-media outlet. Whereas audiences are used to categories of media formats in the past as being print, television, or radio, individual social-media platforms may have a comparable status as categories, rather than part of some wider category we call social media. Thus, Twitter is better analogized to radio, television, or print media than to some wider category of online media. However, this situation alone does not confirm that no change has occurred, as it is partly indicative of the fact that such companies arrive at new applications with established followings and as reputable mediators of cutting-edge news. In this sense, it is reasonable to expect the media to continue their dominant position.
Another way of assessing media change is to identify how an average Twitter user accesses information and, in this regard, it is clear that the sources of news have become more fragmented in the digital era. Equally, the environments where news is found have shifted and no longer rely on hierarchical rankings. For example, the free Twitter browsing device Tweetdeck allows a user to prescribe what they see by setting up curated Twitter lists, which respond to specific search interests. In other words, what distinguishes the era of social media is that there is no generic way that everyone uses the platform, no single channel that everyone experiences. There is simply a filter bubble of our own making. Such environments effectively blur forms of personal correspondence with news content, when often the former also performs the action of the latter.
Yet it would be naive to imagine that such platforms as Twitter herald a news era of one-to-one or even many-to-many communication. Indeed, the recently introduced “Moments” option within Twitter provides a collaboratively editorialized stream of Twitter content, albeit a stream that is reliant on trending topics within the platform (Caddy 2015). While social-media platforms trade off the idea that it personalizes communications, a considerable amount of Twitter activity is shared automatically. Indeed, such applications as If This Then That (IFTTT) allows uses to push content to Twitter simply by setting up a link from a website’s RSS feed to a Twitter account. To many, the content may appear as a personal act involving some manual labor, though often it is not. Equally, social media may easily become antithetical to sociability, via the rise of Twitter spam and Twitter porn, which have been present in Twitter since its inception. In this sense, it is hard not to conclude that one end consequence of the proliferation of social media is a removal of inter-personal connectivity, in exchange for a system of automated sharing devices. One begins to see such nuances within prominent social-media platforms which have gone through a long period of providing a key service, but which then have begun to monetize the platform, as for promoted tweets in Twitter, or Facebook Ads shown in users’ news feeds. Indeed, one must always conclude that the business model of social media is first to capture a user’s attention, make the use of the platform a daily habit, and then exploit this habitual behavior by sprinkling advertising into the environment. By the point at which this monetization occurs, the users will be so tethered to the platform due to its value in assembling their social network, that the monetized content will be accepted reluctantly, but certainly. For this reason, the long-term goal of social-media platforms is for them to become highly personalized social advertising environments, where the user is so interested in the content that they do not even perceive it as advertising. However, there are also greater aspirations that surround the rhetoric of owners of social media, as might be said of Mark Zuckerberg in his aspiration for the company to bring the Internet to parts of the world where it is not yet available.
Overall, social media have had a dramatic effect on how the Olympic Games organizes its communications and how it mobilizes its community. Social media now are where news is broken, where new audiences are formed, and where new streams of revenue are generated. These three changes have become cornerstones of the Sport 2.0 era, which is demarcated by a shift away from more traditional media formats. The next chapter focuses on the institutions responsible for creating content and consumer communities, before returning to a discussion about how new communities of citizen journalists are taking ownership of the channels of communication around the Olympic Games.