Abstract
This essay explores how the organizers of the biggest media event in the world, the Olympic Games, interpret and construct their audiences. By critically tracing the discursive evolution of a 50-year span of official Olympic documents, we see the emergence of “the audience” as a key constitutive player in Olympic narratives. This is followed by a recognition of multiple audience groups and an emphasis on publishing publics in the digital era. The findings build on previous research by highlighting an important Western semantic distinction between audiences and publics and questioning what it means to be a member of the modern-day public when that is increasingly linked to digitally publishing an opinion.
Media events like the Olympic Games present an important context for communications research. Over 4 billion people watch some part of the Games on television or other digital media (Global Broadcast Report, 2012) but size alone is not what makes them such a potent force. This essay argues that one reason behind the power of media events like the Olympics is their capacity to engage a range of audiences and to evoke a multiplicity of issues beyond sport (Chalip, 2000; Fiske, 1986). Still, while a significant amount of research exists on how various media institutions frame the Games, there has yet to be a critical discourse analysis of how the organizers of the biggest spectacle on earth think about their audiences.
As the 2016 Rio Olympics shine the latest spotlight on a country and a culture, this essay asks how has the Olympic movement’s understanding of its audiences evolved over time? Furthermore, what broader lessons may be drawn for audience studies about the ways in which media event audiences, writ large, are implied, constructed, and either enabled or disabled by organizations?
To answer these questions, this essay applies a critical discourse analysis (Fairclough, 1995; Riles, 2006) to a 50-year span of key Olympic communications documents with a focus on two specific time periods: the 1960s, which coincided with the broader boom of television and the making of the mass audience (Napoli, 2011), and the early 2000s, which marked the dawn of the digital audience (Olympic Congress, 2009). Each of the selected texts, leading up to Rio’s 2016 Strategic Communications Plan, can be considered a watershed moment for the Olympic movement’s understanding of its audiences and serves as a time-stamped snapshot allowing us to trace how specific audience-organizational relationships have evolved over time. (The full list of documents can be found in the “References” section, marked by an asterisk.)
An evolution: multiple audiences and publishing publics
For our purposes, the story begins in the 1960s when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) recognized “the public” as a singular entity, and as a specific stakeholder, capable of influencing the Olympic image. While the media have been an important constituent of the Olympic Games from the very first modern Olympics in 1896—there were 12 journalists covering the 1896 Games in Athens! (Nicholson, Kerr, & Sherwood, 2015)—the establishment of the Press Commission in the 1960s signaled the IOC’s written recognition, for the first time, of the need for an organizational department to strategically handle the mediated relationship between itself and the public (Press Commission, 2014).
What follows during the next 50-year span of the Olympic documents is the infiltration of the term audience, along with the mass popularization of television, and the recognition of a diversification of audiences. This diversification ranges from a single mass in the 1960s to 19 diverse groups in 2016, who are strategically “called into being” at various times of the media event. This refraction of the “audience” into multiple “audiences” and the increasingly granular understanding of these groups of people are consistent with broader audience research (Butsch & Livingstone, 2013) and industry practices.
Furthermore, the Olympic organization and Games hosts seem to have created their own typology of “audiences,” which denotes different groups and affordances. While we should not get swept away in interpretations of what their word choices mean these choices, nonetheless, suggest specific ways that the Olympic organization conceptualizes and relates to groups and individuals. For instance, “spectator” tends to be used primarily for in-stadium audiences who are present at live events. “Audience(s)” tends to imply those watching the Games in some mediated format, and “public” carries a greater level of polysemy, which appears to have evolved over the course of the documents.
For instance, in the later 2000s documents, we see the word “public” enter the discourse once again, and while there is various slippage between terms in the Olympic documents, the word “public” here does seem to denote a qualitatively different relationship from its earlier uses in the 1960s documents and from the term “audience.” The following sections explore what this qualitatively different relationship looks like and, more importantly, what this can tell us about the evolving nature of media event audiences.
In the 1960s Fonds documents, the word “public” primarily means the reading public, who access information about the Games via print media. However, by the time we reach the documents from the 2000s, the discourse analysis suggests that “public” has come to mean three slightly different things: “public opinion” as a mass consensus, “public opinion” where a personal opinion is made public but does not necessarily reflect a unified voice, and “public” as connected to publishing (IOC, 2005). The general shift in implication throughout these texts is that the audience becomes a public through some form of publication—through a voicing of their opinion—and it appears that this “voicing” increasingly takes place through publishing content online:
Through the press and social media, the planet’s eyes will be on Rio de Janeiro. Journalists and citizens who publish content on the web are the ones who will ultimately define the success of the Games. (Rio’s 2016 Strategic Communications Plan, 2012, p. 16)
As the documents evolve, it is this latter meaning of a “publishing public” that is increasingly evoked and, in turn, distinguished from the type of public we may have encountered in academic writing before. The publics we tend to be familiar with in scholarly works are typically of economic and democratic construct (Dewey, 1927), rational debate (Habermas, 1991), counter-positioning (Warner, 2002), and affective formation (Papacharissi, 2014). They also tend to be discursive constructions, dependent upon the circulation of texts and meanings. While the discursively formed public is the closest rendition to the type of public that the Olympic documents increasingly evoke, there are still some important distinctions.
For one, the Olympic movement’s public is called into being through digital production and is, therefore, at least partially governed by algorithmic, contractual, and socio-technical means. This is not to say that publics could not or did not produce any Olympic narratives prior to the advent of digital media. Rather, it is simply to note that from the perspective of the IOC, audience participation, and thus becoming a public, increasingly seems to mean publishing content online and influencing the Olympic narratives in a manner that the rest of the media-watching world can see. In other words, these latter types of Olympic publics are primarily effects of their media use.
Of course, the discursive move of increasingly equating participation with publishing is worthy of attention itself since it inherently creates a hierarchy of audiences, audiencing (Fiske, 1992), and power. If Katz and Dayan (1992) argued that television was the great equalizer of media events—more money could not buy you a better seat or view—then perhaps, today, we can make an alternative argument that new media serve to destabilize television’s social equilibrium and to insert a hierarchy of audience access and participation back into media events. Digital media allow some to become publishing publics and others to remain mass audience members.
Entering the broader debate: audiences versus publics
The Olympic movement’s discursive distinction between the audience(s) and the public is in line with Butsch (2008) who notes that historically, audiences have been characterized according to three categories: rowdy crowds, individuals in a mass, and publics. The findings also support Livingstone (2005), who highlights a similar division, where audiences and publics have been seen in normative opposition to each other but goes a step further to imply that the audience is often understood as private and passive, whereas the public is communal and engaged. Still, this essay extends Butsch’ (2008) and Livingstone’s (2005) arguments by pointing to several additional developments.
First, while the findings in this article support the notion of a separation between audiences and publics, they do not necessarily carry all of the same normative implications. In fact, the more that audiences are seen as publics, capable of producing a public opinion through creating digital Olympic content, the more they are also classified and treated as individual platforms, which need to receive targeted and formatted content to then relay on to their subsequent networks of audiences. This distinction is indicative of the socio-technical properties attached to being a modern-day media events public—one that is increasingly defined by the effects of its media use.
To further illustrate this point, let’s consider the following example: with the closing of the Rio Games on 21 August 2016, the IOC will launch its year-round Olympic Channel. This is a digital-first platform, which is integrated with an app and several popular social media platforms. The Channel’s digital ecosystem will allow users to customize their Olympic content, to participate in Olympic narratives via highly circumscribed means such as voting and quizzes and, importantly, to share some experiences with others in their social networks. Subsequently, this highly immersive media environment and the ability to share tailored content with others creates an image of the digital Channel users as extensions of, and platforms for the dissemination of Olympic narratives. It also points to a second notion, which is the idea of audience expansion.
Expansion is built into the Olympic DNA through the foundational Olympic document, the Olympic Charter (IOC, 2015), which inscribes audience and platform growth as a key organizational goal. Rio’s Games already see the inclusion of two new sports (golf and rugby) and their respective audiences, and new media platforms such as the Olympic Channel demonstrate how additional audiences can be sought through the social media outreach of the digital Channel’s users. In turn, the Olympic organization needs some structural flexibility to accommodate for new voices, and the evolution of the policy documents is, perhaps, the clearest evidence we have that the IOC is a somewhat flexible structure that does take audience participation into account.
At the same time, the discourse analysis also shows that audience expansion is not only an imperative but also a challenge. Each of the documents analyzed can be read as a response to some audience crisis. For instance, the first document, the 1960s Press Commission Fonds, grew out of a realization that the IOC needed to better connect with the outside media and public; it came out of a necessity to better control the Olympic message. Similarly, the digital debate in the 2000s took place in the context over worries that digital media publics were posing a threat to the relatively linear mediation of the Games available thus far. Subsequently, audiences and the idea of publishing publics appear as both a necessity and a source of tension for the Olympic organizers.
Beyond the Games: trends and implications
As we are frequently reminded, the Games are a stadium for the enactment not only of celebration but also of scandal and struggle. Now the Olympic hosts and the IOC compete with a range of official and non-official mediators—increasingly including their publics—to control the narratives of this event. It is therefore worth asking whether we are seeing a broader socio-political trend where to be a member of the modern-day public you need to make your publicness known through publication. It is also worth inquiring whether participation must equal digital publishing and what interest the Olympic organization has in increasingly defining its publics and processes of audience participation in this way.
Perhaps, one answer is that through an emphasis on the publishing public, the Olympic movement is able to keep up with the evolutions of the wider media environment and to exert some degree of control over its narratives by owning the non-human platforms of narrative dissemination (i.e. the official website and television production rights), by putting out guidelines for those publishing Olympic narratives (e.g. athletes and the media), and by creating strategic ecosystems for audience participation (e.g. interactive websites and apps).
Still, as part of a larger project, this essay presents just one side of the Olympic audience evolution story—the sanctioned one. Furthermore, through the question how do organizations make sense of their media events audiences through institutionally created texts? its answers present a Western interpretation rooted in local, semantic distinctions between English language words such as “audience,” “public,” and “spectator.” Needless to say, these semantic differences are not universal, which implies the need for a better empirical understanding of the multicultural nuances embedded in the meaning of an audience.
Nonetheless, as Warner (2002) suggests, publics are imagined and fleeting. Despite the media industries’ best attempts to predict what the audiences, spectators, or publics will look and behave like for a media event such as the Rio 2016 Games, there is still an element of unknown and perhaps, it is precisely within this aura of the unknown that the power of the Olympic audience lies.