How Twitter and Social Media made the Olympics awesome

I don't care about sports. I don't play any sports. I don't enjoy sports, but I love the Olympics. I loved the opening ceremony, which was the best I'd seen in my life and this is coming from someone who has seen two Olympic ceremonies in his life, this being the second. The Olympic Opening Ceremony was amazing. Now I say it was amazing, but I really mean was, it was a lot of fun to tweet along with it. It was great watching my followers and people I follow praise, mock and adore the Brits putting on the greatest show on the earth. Aliens were probably seeing the broadcast from space and thought we'd declared world peace.

...it only took them over a billion Earth years.

However, Twitter was not entirely positive. A story came out yesterday morning that journalist, Guy Adams was suspended from Twitter for making critical comments about the American coverage of the Olympics. NBC is the proud peacock of one of the five big TV networks in the US. It's a bit like if Seven and Nine crashed into each other, for an Australian comparison. The hashtag #NBCFail began to trend halfway through the ceremony being broadcast in the United States as the main broadcaster cut to an old interview of Ryan Seacrest interviewing swimming sensation, Michael Phelps.

"So...what's your favourite blend of pot?"

It was at a particularly bad time to cut away as it was just when the Olympic ceremony was paying a great tribute to the people who were sadly killed during the July 7th terrorist attack from 2005. A lot of commentators were saying it was like if New York had hosted the Olympics and they'd cut to a Monty Python sketch during a 9/11 tribute. The moving piece was placed online sometime after the BBC broadcast but it was fairly disrespectful to both the American and British public. Anyway, back to Guy Adams, an American correspondent was removed from Twitter at the behest of NBC, who persuaded the social network to remove him after reporting on a story about the negative coverage of the London Olympics.

And not just your usual shitty rain jokes...

Twitter told Mr. Adams that his "account [was] suspended for posting an individual's private information such as....private email address...financial documents" etc. This was due to a Adams sending a tweet containing the email of NBC Olympic chairmen, Gary Zenkel, who I think was on an episode of Mr. Blobby once. The odd thing is that the backlash caused an even greater stir with more than a thousand stories popping up within a few hours of Adams breaking his own story. In fact, if you look for Mr. Zenkel's email now, you'll get more than six thousand results all based around Mr. Adams story and tweets. This is partially apart of the Barbra Streisand effect.

Hello Dolly!

A few other problems that came to light but weren't that big a deal in the Twittersphere included the fact the Olympic flame died shortly after being lit, people were claiming a lesbian kiss was cut out of the NBC Broadcast, then it turned out it wasn't and finally, NBC thinking their viewers are dumb. The Friday night Olympic ceremony was actually delayed and heavily edited with an NBC spokesperson saying that "it was never [their] intent to live stream the Opening or Closing Ceremony. They are complex entertainment spectacles that do not translate well online because they require context..." It was insulting even if you weren't an American. The whole thing is on YouTube right now (but probably will be taken down by the IOC periodically), and without any extra commentary.

This needs no explanation whatsoever...

Whilst I have my own criticisms on Sport and Spectacle people need to recognise that if someone is linked into a larger online community or conscious, their story will become a lot larger than you could ever expect. While I don't think Mr. Adams was in the right to put Mr. Zenkel's email straight onto the tweet, I think it would have been a bit better for him maybe to say that people should direct their complaints to NBC Olympics on their official page or at least mention that Zenkel's email was online. Regardless, the reaction from NBC was childish and I don't doubt that now Adams' Twitter is reactivated, that he gained a few thousand Twitter followers from his recent exposure.



People often forget a lot of the negative and controversial press that surrounded the previous Olympics and even further back than that. I guess, there was a lot more pressure on London this time around, but I honestly think they pulled it off. I watched almost all of the Channel 9 broadcast of the Opening Ceremony and the only negative criticism I had was the commentary by Eddie McGuire who was clearly speaking to the Hi-5 audience or stating the blithering obvious.

One, two, three. Three! Ah ah ah! I've been on three commercial networks!

The odd thing is that whilst NBC was also broadcasting most of the games on their website, they failed to think of the way the internet often works now. This is the first Olympics the world has seen with fully functioning social networks that are able to have users respond in real time, fast and with such force that they can cause a real movement. The Beijing Olympics was in 2008, back when Facebook barely had a hundred million followers, when Twitter barely had more than a few million  tweets following around the world and when MySpace was slowly dying out.

So hope there is no such thing as MySpace zombies...

The world was a very different place. The social media world loves being connected and interacting with people, whether it's just something trending, like I was, or they just want to be apart of something. Not much has changed from before, it's just that with Twitter, everything is a spectator sport and Twitter is everyone yelling from the stands.


Resources:
The Independent, "#NBCFail:Backlash as Twitter locks out reporter Guy Adams" - http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/nbcfail-backlash-as-twitter-locks-out-reporter-guy-adams-7987906.html
Daily What, "NBC Response of the Day" - http://thedailywh.at/2012/07/29/nbc-response-of-the-day/

Also, this became unfunny before the Opening Ceremony ended: