Goldstream News Gazette
Royal Roads professor of communications Michael Real says the 2010 Olympics are primed for success, as long as the weather holds up.
Go here for a great picture of Real!:
http://www.bclocalnews.com/vancouver_island_south/goldstreamgazette/news/The_games_behind_the_Games.html
Edward Hill/News staff
By Edward Hill – Goldstream News GazettePublished: January 22, 2010 5:00 PM
Updated: January 25, 2010 6:54 AM
RRU media professor offers insights on the 2010 Winter Games
Three short weeks and all eyes will be on Vancouver.
Hundreds of thousands of spectators will funnel through nine Winter Olympic competition venues, watching 5,000 athletes amid the largest security operation in Canadian history – and under the glare of 10,000 members of the international media.
What could possibly go wrong? Terrorism? Ski hill foreclosure? Transportation gridlock? How about rain.
“The crazy thing about the Winter Olympics is that one component you have no control over – the weather,” says Michael Real, a professor of communications at Royal Roads University. “Its amazing to have an astounding accumulation of resources, financial investment and people in one place, and be beholden in scary ways to simple weather.”
Real, an expert on media influence on sports, says the games behind the Games and how the region is broadcast to the world will be as almost as interesting to watch as, for instance, the men’s gold medal hockey game.
Compared to the construction panic in Turin 2006 or the 2004 Summer Olympics in Athens, Real says, Vancouver’s Olympic infrastructure is in place and venues are built and working.
“Everything seems to be running smoothly. They’ve actually held competitions at the venues,” he says. “It’s not like Turin or Athens were they threw things up at the last second. Athens was really bad. Two months before the Games they weren’t even near completion.”
A real stress-test of the Vancouver Organizing Committee (Vanoc) could be transportation between venues in Whistler, Vancouver and Richmond and how the local population adjusts to road closures and inconvenience. Hopefully Vanoc took notes on what not to do from the 1996 Atlanta Games, Real says.
“Atlanta was a disaster transportation-wise. They had situations where athletes hijacked buses to get to events,” Real says. “But the outlook for Vancouver and Whistler is very positive in those terms.”
Real predicts the host population of Vancouverites and British Columbians will step up and be helpful to masses of tourists. He doesn’t expect anti-Olympic activists to dominate foreign or local news coverage, but notes that protests are part of any healthy democratic society.
But social issues such as homelessness could certainly make Olympic media coverage more complicated for Vanoc. The city and security forces can’t take a heavy handed approach getting homeless people indoors, Real says, but can’t remain idle either.
“Vancouver certainly has got its fair share of problems such as homelessness,” he says. “If you don’t do enough to help, you get the public focusing on those problems. But if you spend billions to impress the world, you don’t want people to say Vancouver is just a place with homeless people.”
Real is more worried about security foul-ups, particularly the RCMP becoming embroiled in controversy. Vancouver still has a lingering black eye from the death of Robert Dziekanski, who was stunned by RCMP officers with a Taser in October 2007 at Vancouver International Airport.
“That got such press all over the world. TV, newspapers, websites carried it around the world,” he says. “In that sense it dug a hole for Vancouver. The Olympics will help get it out of that hole.”
Whether Vancouver will see its reputation rehabilitated and reap economic rewards in tourism and trade due to the Olympics is a hard question, Real says. The 1988 Summer Olympics genuinely landed Seoul, South Korea, on the world’s radar, he says. Cities such as Nagano, Japan, or Lillehammer, Norway, not so much. Real points out that Vancouver is the largest host city of a Winter Olympic Games and has broken new ground on including partners such as First Nations groups.
Vanoc estimates 3 billion people will watch the Vancouver Games, but long gone are the days when the Olympics would monopolize the airwaves. NBC paid $2 billion for U.S. coverage of the 2010 and 2012 Games, and already expects to lose money.
A large chuck of the world doesn’t have an interest or climate for winter sports and in big markets such as the U.S., competition for viewers is fierce. Vancouver, at least, is in a nearby time zone as much of the U.S.
“U.S. ratings for the Turin Olympics lost out to reality TV shows,” Real says. “There is the Internet, hundreds of cable channels. One event doesn’t draw people like it did before. The Olympics used to be the only game in town.”
But sponsorship is still the name of the game these days to get the Games off the ground. Corporations pour in hundred so of millions for exclusive marketing rights, which Vanoc vigorously guards. There’s rumours some athletes in Vancouver will need to cover logos on their running shoes for non-sponsor brands.
Real plans to attend a few Olympic events with his family, and says the Games are a net positive for the region and for the world.
“The Games provide an opportunity for people of different cultures and nations to get together and share and celebrate without war and violence,” he says. “Canada has a good track record in the world as an Olympics country. Canada is trusted that the Games will be a success and well received. We’ll just have to see if it overcomes TV competition.”
The Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, currently under negotiation by Mexico, the US, Canada, Australia, the EU, Japan, South Korea, and New Zealand, is a proposed treaty for ’strong intellectual property’ rights through international enforcement via cooperation and coordination among member countries; it goes beyond the WTO Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property. Conducted with little to no public transparency, and in secrecy, with Parliamentary processes and input from public interest groups and citizens dismissed, ACTA would ostensibly deal with the counterfeiting of goods, including apparel, books, audio, video, software, food products, pharmaceuticals, and other consumer goods such as electronics, and piracy. But consumer groups are concerned that ACTA would regulate the internet and non-commercial uses – in particular searching and seizing laptops and iPods at international borders to check for illegal downloading.
“The secrecy surrounding this treaty is a complete reversal of the commitments your government has made to ensure public input and consultation on changes to Canadian copyright law,” commented Michael Geist in the CBC report (referring to the Government of Canada’s summer 2009 consultations on copyright reform), ”This secrecy undermines the credibility of the ministers of Industry and Heritage who have both made some effort to engage the public prior to the development of a new copyright framework for Canada.”
As the CBC reports, a consortium of global public interest and consumer groups are contesting ACTA through a Joint Declaration, alleging that it is being pushed by the US entertainment industry and will result in restricted access for citizens particularly by: ”allowing internet service providers to cut customers off if sharing copyrighted files is alleged; limiting the interoperability of legally acquired digital content, such as music or movies; authorizing border guards to search and seize laptops and MP3 players if copyright infringing material is found on them; introducing criminal sanctions for copyright infringements.”
Read more: http://www.cbc.ca/arts/music/story/2010/01/26/acta-copyright-secret-discussions.html#ixzz0drINs1QG
See Charlie Angus, NDP MP, on ACTA:
See also: Public Knowledge ACTA page
Tevi Gevinson, a 13 year old from the suburbs of Chicago (she describes herself as “wears batman capes and oversized hats. Scatters black petals on Rei Kawakubo’s doorsteps and serenades her in rap. Nowhere near 4 million readers but probably the same amount of clothes in my closet that I should probably clean out soon”) , has taken the fashion world by storm through her personal blog, Style Rookie, where she writes about fashion (high and low) and has garnered the attention of major fashion designers including Rodarte, who consulted with her on their new collection for Target.
Dave McGinn in The Globe and Mail reports on Tevi and other young bloggers…
Rabble has published a series of columns on the need for independent media in Canada. Written by Rick Fillmore, whose bio reads: “an editor and producer with the CBC for 18 years and has been involved in several print media projects. A freelance journalist and media fundraiser based in Toronto, he is a founding member of the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ) and Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE).”
Part 1, December 8, 2009: Canwest latest ‘media giant’ to exploit news operations.
Part 2, December 15: Why we must limit the influence of corporate media.
Part 3, January 5, 2010, Globe’s pro-business reporting example of bad journalism.
Part 4, January 12, 2010. Sustainable independent media needs a breakthrough.
NYU Libraries has purchased the papers of feminist Kathleen Hanna of the former punk bands Bikini Kill and Le Tigre as part of its Riot Grrrl Archives. Mary Elizabeth Williams in Salon reports on the acquisition here.
A montage of films where the mobile gets wet, loses power, or there is no signal…
From Newsweek’s Mobile Matters.
The Privacy Commission of Canada is embarking on a consultation about the various dimensions of privacy in emerging technologies, including social media and mobile media. They are looking particularly at consumer privacy issues such as online marketing, behavioral marketing, and surveillance. Details of the consultation process and background information can be found here.
