Even as we amp up that “Go Canada!” pride, there’s still no shaking Vancouver 2010’s “Bailout Games” label.
The Guardian recently reported it as a six-billion dollar investment with no return, and social media has been blamed for NBC’s loss of US$250-million on its media rights investment due to an audience increasingly fragmented by new media channels, dwindling the value of television ads for Olympic corporate sponsors.
So all eyes are on W2 Culture + Media House, a “cultural and arts infrastructure” that will host international bloggers, technologists and journalists during what has now being called the first “Social Media” Winter Games.
Located in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, the 13,000-square-foot Woodward's Building is a media arts centre providing 24/7 webcasting, digital media labs, and a TV studio for outlets like CNN iReport and Rabble.ca, and curating cultural programming featuring 150 DJs, VJs, as well as visual and media artists.
“This will be likely the first and last independent social media centre,” says W2 executive director Irwin Oostindie, who positions Vancouver between Beijing 2008’s failed open media environment and London 2012’s likely monetization of social media.
“It’s an interesting experiment where we’re living in a country like Canada with this remaining free space for citizens to engage and direct democracy through digital storytelling.”
W2 is also positioning itself as a mediated space, allowing for marginalized voices to emerge. It will host the Legal Observer program led by PIVOT Legal Society and the B.C. Civil Liberties Association, with mini camera-carrying volunteers monitoring Olympic security for any human rights violations.
But citizen-led media access comes at a cost. W2 doesn’t offer free wireless for its mostly unaccredited journalists and bloggers: The Centre lacks core funding and relies upon a user-pay system, which speaks to the greater issue of sustainability for Canadian new media innovation.
“The Olympics is a mega-media moment highlighting this state of transition and the new world we’re in,” explains Steve Anderson, a national co-ordinator for media issues non-profit OpenMedia.ca.
Anderson considers community media centres like W2 vital in developing socially-driven media. It why he’s involved with the Fresh Media Olympics, a W2-hosted conference using the Olympics and its worldwide coverage to analyze social media’s impact on the traditional media landscape.
So maybe this isn’t the Bailout Games. According to Oostindie, there’s a bright side to media rights holders losing their investment on the biggest marketed event in sports: “We can actually look at equitable distribution so that producers and consumers... will in fact be underwriting their own cultural consumption.”
– Rea McNamara writes about the on/offline statuses of niches and subcultures. Follow her on Twitter @reeraw
