Executive director Irwin Oostindie in the Downtown Eastside’s new W2 Culture + Media House, which will give non-professional writers access to a variety of media tools during the 2010 Winter Games.

Credit: Doug Shanks

COVER FEATURE: W2 seeks to democratize Olympic coverage

In the years before online social networking was as common as trading business cards, people would watch the Olympics on TV and listen for radio updates on the drive in to work. Now, with the coming-of-age of Web 2.0 technologies alongside the evolution of Vancouver’s large and growing new-media community, the game — and Games — has changed.

At the centre of it all, the W2 Culture + Media House, in the Downtown Eastside, will host hundreds of bloggers, technologists, and independent and professional journalists during the 2010 Winter Games, marking the first Olympics in which social media will play a prominent role in covering its goings-on.

“We can say that Vancouver 2010 is the first truly digital Olympic Games,” says Andy Miah, chair in Ethics and Emerging Technologies in the School of Media, Language, and Music at the University of the West of Scotland. Miah has been researching new media and the Olympics for 10 years, at six Olympic Games. He’ll be working at the British Columbia International Media Centre and Whistler Media House during the 2010 Games.

“Web 2.0 was really getting started around the time that Vancouver won the [Olympic] bid, and now it’s fully flourishing,” says Miah. “The key question will be whether the mass of social-media reporting will transform the narrative of Vancouver’s Games into something more than just sport.”

Miah points out that there will be almost the same number of non-accredited journalists at the Games as those with official media accreditation, resulting in a potentially dramatic increase in the range of stories told about the event, and about the city. “The mass media — or accredited media — are so focused on celebrating the sports that their agendas don’t permit much deviation from the narrative,” he says. “This is why social media is so critical. When we look back in history, we will want to know what took place throughout Vancouver, not just what happened in the stadia.”

Creating a space where marginalized communities can voice their experience of the Games is one of W2 executive director Irwin Oostindie’s goals for the Culture + Media House. “The dialogue we’re fostering around social media and the Olympics is really about how we can reveal diverse communities’ experience and interest in the Olympic Games, apart from the dominant stories,” he says. “What is the experience of Filipino and Punjabi Vancouverites, who are not represented in the Winter Games?... For us, social media is an opportunity to enable more voices — a proliferation of voices — to bring more democracy to whose stories are told in Canadian culture.”

The W2 Culture + Media House will operate out of a mixed-use cultural space at 112 West Hastings, across the street from the new Woodward’s complex. Oostindie will make broadcasting equipment available to social-media enthusiasts, journalists, and Downtown Eastside residents interested in relaying their experiences related to the Games. W2 will also be home to the Legal Observer program headed up by the Pivot Legal Society and BC Civil Liberties Association, which will monitor the operations of Olympic security during Games time.

“We have to look at building a civil society that has a functioning democracy, and social media has a tremendous role to play in the future to ensure that people are not lost through the digital divide,” says Oostindie. “We always need to strive to access what we want for Vancouver [in the year] 2020, and not get lost in the moment of 2010.”

Members of Vancouver’s Fresh Media team will be among the new-media groups operating out of W2 during Games time. Launched in the past year by a group of artists and online-media enthusiasts, Fresh Media was created with the desire to make something new out of what its founders saw as the collapse of traditional media. “Fresh Media is a project of OpenMedia.ca, a national nonprofit organization working to advance and support an open and innovative communications system in Canada,” says co-founder Steve Anderson.

Fresh Media will host an event at W2 about social media and the Olympics on Monday, February 22. Information is available at W2’s website, CreativeTechnology.org. “We want to encourage participants to seize this mega-media moment and make it their own,” says Anderson of the event. “To me, W2 could become a physical mirror image of the internet, an open platform for citizen collaboration of all types.”

While social media will undoubtedly play a significant role in how Olympic information is disseminated during Games time, traditional journalism still has its place, says Linda Solomon, who publishes the Vancouver Observer, an independent online news publication. Many of her reporters will be operating out of W2’s media space during the Olympics. “There is no better seed for deep local reporting from the community than social media, but it’s just a seed,” she says. “Solid reporting by trained journalists is vital to creating a context for the Tweets and posts of social media.”

Acknowledging that traditional media is, in her words, “in a state of breakdown,” Solomon’s Observer aims to create a space for what she calls “public-service writers.”

“The fact that the Vancouver Observer has attracted such a large, skilled, and dedicated group of these public-service journalists speaks to the possibility of building a system that will work in the future,” Solomon says. “Web 2.0 tools have given people like me an opportunity to take back some control of the news media, to create platforms that level the playing field by giving an audience and a future to writers who have been closed out by downsizing.”

Yet, for all of W2’s and its supporters’ desire to level the playing field with regard to who gets a say in how we report on the Olympics, the question of how the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Vancouver Organizing Committee for the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games (VANOC) will treat independent social media initiatives like W2 remains to be seen.

“The IOC has based its relationship with the media largely in a system of control: very tight regulations about the Olympic trademark, what can be said, what can be used, who can shoot images, what video can be published,” says Alfred Hermida, a digital-media scholar and professor at UBC’s journalism school. “That system of control is fairly straightforward to maintain when you know exactly who the media is... It doesn’t work in an internet age when, basically, we all carry around with us the tools to be journalists.”

An increasingly blurred division between official and unofficial media — particularly with regard to how it will play out in Vancouver next month — may challenge the IOC to change its approach in how it handles media during Games time. “What we have here is a major sporting event taking place in a western liberal democracy, in a country that is highly wired, and in a city that has a very active social-media scene,” Hermida says. “In many ways, this is a tremendous opportunity to really expand the appeal of the Olympics, and to involve not just established media, but involve emerging media, and involve the public in general into celebrating this through the media.

“But for that,” he warns, “you need to accept that you will get the good, the bad, and the ugly.”