(Person) Percentage - Sabanci University Research Database

The Asian Media & Mass Communication Conference 2010 Osaka, Japan
To demonstrate one example of a global event – the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics – as a
moment and an issue worth examining through the lens of media education, we must first
contextualize what the event has meant for the host city and the imagined audiences. The
Olympics offer extraordinary publicity for the host city, a “nearly unparalleled global
communications opportunity” to set a “global marker” or a “gold standard” of what a city can
achieve, as explicated by Meg Holden, Julia Mackenzie, and Robert VanWynsberghe (2008, p.
884). In light of this worldwide attention, carefully constructed images of the city are vital to the
packaging and presentation of localities as “multicultural, diverse, and entertaining” as well as
“friendly, enjoyable, and cohesive communities woven together by locally enmeshed cultural
and emotional ties,” as articulated by Katherine McCallum, Amy Spencer, and Elvin K. Wyly
(2005, p. 25). The more popular visuals used in promotional materials to represent Vancouver
included images of totem poles, Native art, historic Gastown, Chinatown, Little India, the Pacific
Ocean, city beaches, coastal mountains, forests, and the Canadian flag – the most stereotypical,
recognizable, and identifiable markers on which to build international recognition for the city
with beautiful natural surroundings and a richly multicultural population (McCallum, Spencer, &
Wyly, 2005). But, as James Higham (1999) notes, celebration is not met without controversy:
“Host cities may stand to lose more than they gain in terms of destination image. Capacity constraints,
financial costs, the displacement and, in some cases, physical removal of host residents, political activism
and terrorism offer huge potential for negative publicity. Crowding and congestion are often associated
with the staging of events with local residents often excluded from participating in their event for reasons
of ticket allocation and cost. The role of local residents in hosting sporting mega-events, it seems, is often
less glamorous than some attempt to portray” (p. 84-86).
Indeed, as virtually all Olympic Games in recent past have been surrounded by different degrees
of controversy (Vancouver being no exception), tensions are often felt by local and international
audiences as they experience the contrast between the representations and realities of these
global media events.
Yet much of the media events theoretical debates center on the spectacle itself, with insufficient
focus on the varied experiences of the diverse viewers (Hepp & Krotz, 2008; Kyriakidou, 2008).
Kyriakidou (2008) acknowledges that it is in the responses of audiences that media events are
“negotiated, endorsed, challenged or transformed” – in other words, given meaning (p. 274).
Similarly, Puijk (2009) contends: “It is clear that the meaning of the [events] was not universal,
but complex, multi-layered and differentiated according to the positions of viewers and the
discourses with which they were confronted” (p. 8). In a moment of intense publicity, youth in
Vancouver encounter a visual bombardment of glossy visuals that brand their locality as a worldclass
city and tourist attraction for the international community. What are some of the ways that
young residents, as ‘cultural insiders’, make meaning of the Olympics? How does the global
media event inform or shape their sense of identity, community, and worldview (Goodman,
2003)? What follows is a case study in media education, as students in the Vancouver School
District undertake a project to deconstruct promotional images of their city, produce cultural
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