The Olympic View

World global culture ?

What are the Olympic Games?

Expression of a global culture of equally competing individuals?
Womans ski jump London first games with woman in all events

An exercise in nation-branding An economic platform for MNC An international media event An expression of global consciousness

Competing individuals
Coubertin and the first modern gamesGreece 1896- Pan human unity in a time of rising nationalism The Platonian ideals- athletics Participation is open Recognizing nations but not elevating them

Nation branding
Themes of games: The aboriginal Heritage (Sydney 2000) Greek heritage (2004) Beijing (2008) One World- one Dream. Vancouver With glowing Hearts London Inspire a generation Going for national gold- USA, China, UK, Russia but also everyone else- Who won in London? National uniforms, national TV spin, competing nations rather than competing individuals. Citizenship changes to boost natiional results Participation of politicians ( Boycot debates)

Olympics as economics
The sponsors- Coca Cola, BMW, Mc Donalds, Lenovo, The taxpayers The economic effects? Surplus deficit for the games for the country For the individual sports

Olympics as media
The role of USA TV- main contract- own cameras. Now choice of feed Who watches? The age problem The same event??
Focus, agenda Each nation sees different things: Us against the world. Injected profiles into coverage Some direct and using the feed. Others time delay because of time differences Luo Qing, Encoding the Olympics, Special isssue of the International Journal of the History of Sports, 2010 (Andrew Billings, Olympic Media, Routledge 2009)

Olympics as global consciousness

The structure of the idea- committee, sports org. are members; The dissemination of the idea- everyone knows what it is: The ideals- the reality- the critique The unifying event- (900 mio viewers of London Opening). Focus for politics, business, branding because it is Global

After Beijing Olympics: where did the view of China change?

The Torch relayThe Sichuan earthquake The games Japanese survey: TV viewers had more positive view in these areas: Chinese are fair, rational, ecological minded , fashionable, gender equality

Olympics as global consciousness

Homogenization or diversity Tomlinson, 1999, the supermarket sets the consumer to choose and offers global brands Berger and Hun. 2002- four faces of Globalization: Davos, faculty club, Mc World culture, Preaching the good word
Global econ leads to global culture Intelligentsia- ideas- environmentalism Mc World sitcoms Religion

As consciousness
The global moment- West is out - glob is in Globalization as institutions- e.g. education Globalization as contending views and/or common perspectives Why is globalization important?

More Glob resulting from the Olympics?

What has changed in terms of the respacialization of social life? Transplanetary social relations?? Bisley: aggregate social consequences that derive from the dramatic increase in which ... moves around the world??

Geographic Representations
A projection, when speaking in terms of mapping, is the view given of the subject by the cartographer. For centuries, such map projections subtly pointed students toward the northern hemisphere and its great societies, and away from the southern hemisphere where water and barbarism prevailed

Mercator Projection- 1568

Peters Map of the World 1974

Mercator vs. Peters

Europe according to the Germans

Europe according to the British