Page 12 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

Introduction: Interacting with Media Sport

The 2008 Beijing Olympics attracted an audience of 4.7 billion over the seventeen
days that the event was staged, equivalent to 70 per cent of the world’s population,
making it the ‘Most Watched Games ever’ (Nielsen Media Research 2008: 1). The
Games cost China £20 million to host and involved 10,708 athletes, 400,000 Chinese
volunteers and 100,000 members of the army and police force (Elmer 2008). This
global media spectacle merged the worlds of popular cinema and sport to create
a breathtaking opening ceremony codirected by the acclaimed Chinese fi lm-maker
Zhang Yimou with a cast of 10,000 people. The resulting extravaganza used choreo-
graphed bodies, music and visual effects to construct an image of Chinese culture
interwoven with the symbolism of sport for consumption by a global television audi-
ence. To begin to unpack the ways that events like the Olympics frame our under-
standing of bodies, nations, identities and values requires us to step back from the
spectacle and analyse how it produces its effects in us. Sport has become such a
powerful vehicle for mediating meanings and feelings that this is not a simple task.
Every image of sport in the media evokes a wealth of associations, constructing a
lens through which to view society. Inevitably, the picture we see conveys all the
complexities of contemporary cultural politics.
In the build-up to the Beijing Olympics, another film director, Steven Spielberg,

publicly withdrew from his appointment as artistic adviser to the opening ceremony
by informing Hu Jintao, the President of the People’s Republic of China, that his
commitment to overcoming ‘intolerance, bigotry, and the suffering they cause’ (Spiel-
berg 2007: 1) was incompatible with China’s support for the Sudanese government,

accused of genocide in Darfur. This was not the first time that the Olympic Games
had been the stage for political protest. The spotlight of the world’s media on one
sporting event provides a forum for political activists to convey their message to
huge audiences. The photographs of the Black Power salute given by the African
American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the winner’s podium at the
1968 Olympics in Mexico City present an example of the enduring nature of media
records of Olympic protests. Similarly, pro-Tibet campaigners who used the Olym-
pics in China to draw attention to their cause took advantage of the close connections
between sport and the media. In March 2008, a member of the campaign group
Reporters Without Borders disrupted the speech being given by the president of
the Beijing Olympic Committee to the world’s assembled media at the lighting of

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