The 2012 Olympics, Twitter and the BBC: Who Benefits from a Globally Engaged Public?
The 2012 Olympic Games in London was a chance for the BBC to expand its global audience. The BBC had a greater ambition, however. It wanted to create a better quality of engagement with BBC services. You might click on a BBC story or have a BBC station on your TV but that could be a superficial engagement. Perhaps you just have wanted to find out the weather forecast on your phone. Maybe you needed a voice coming from the TV because it reassures your nervous dog (true example). By quality engagement, the BBC wants you to be energised by its content, share it with friends, talk about it with your family, and maybe even go out into the world and do something. The Olympics offered enough inspiring events, enough personal connections to people’s towns, cities and countries, that surely there would be buzz, connectivity, and high quality engagement around the world?
At Royal Holloway, we are currently working with the BBC, the Open University and the National Centre for E-Social Science to assess whether this happened. The result matters because an intended by-product of quality engagement is the creation of a ‘global conversation’, a transnational public who exchange information and arguments to rationally arrive at a shared discourse about events that matter to them. This is Habermas on steroids. The BBC Trust defines the global conversation as:
an informed and intelligent dialogue which transcends international borders and cultural divides; by giving communities around the world opportunities to create, publish, and share their own views and stories; and, thereby, enabling people to make sense of increasingly complex regional and global events and developments. (BBC, 2007)
For the BBC this creates a problem of definition. What is a global conversation, how global is global enough, and what counts as a conversation? It also creates a problem of knowledge, for it must demonstrate it is producing these effects to retain its funding, even if these effects aren’t easily observable or measurable. This is where we academics come in.
We have begun a comparative analysis of audience responses to the Olympics on Twitter in English, Arabic, Russian and Persian during the Games. We want to know how people in different regions responded to certain events, but also to the BBC’s coverage of those events. The BBC had many headline successes. There was much praise for the BBC’s iPlayer service in the US following NBC’s decision not to broadcast Olympic events live (#NBCfail). The device ‘Your Athlete Body Match’ was extensively shared on social media. But did this lead to conversations between people in different countries or languages? Was there any sign of ‘informed and intelligent dialogue’ when Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen was accused of doping but American Michael Phelps wasn’t? When Vladimir Putin dropped in for a judo match or when Saudi women participated wearing the hijab?
Who wants a global conversation anyway? While there are obvious commercial benefits for the BBC from a broader and more committed audience, what political interests drive this? It is difficult to disassociate the BBC’s activities from trends in public diplomacy such as Obama’s attempt to ‘engage’ the Muslim world with his Cairo speech in June 2009. Engagement here implies not talking to but talking with and even listening and trying to understand: a full exchange between equals. Cynically, or pragmatically, the public diplomacy scholar Craig Hayden suggests that simply appearing to listen can itself produce positive gains. He writes, ‘an ethical stance towards engagement and communication qua communication may itself be influential’ (2011: 797, italics in original). With the Olympics and the aim of a global conversation, it doesn’t appear that the BBC is trying to communicate a message or listen to others around the world (say, on behalf of the British government). Rather, it is creating platforms and moments for publics to influence each other and an overall ethical stance that such cross-border exchanges are welcome.
As we carry out the research, we will subject the BBC’s underlying concepts of engagement and conversation to critical scrutiny. We might find that the BBC creates more engagement by stirring up conflict and controversy than by cultivating any warm consensus. It may be that the most ‘informed and intelligent dialogue’ occurs when BBC journalists get out of the way. The 2012 Olympics offers the perfect crucible to test political theories of agonism and cosmopolitanism, of affect and contagion, and of the role of media organisations as catalysts and containers of the elusive global conversation.
References:
Hayden, C. (2011) ‘Beyond the “Obama Effect”: Refining the Instruments of Engagement Through U.S. Public Diplomacy’, American Behavioral Scientist, 55(6), 784-802.
