#25: Something to Cheer For
Taking stock of the bubbles, cardboard cutouts and vlogs of this makeshift sports season.
Welcome to Civic Signals, where sports fandom meets virtual stadiums.
This week: Tune in for our color commentary of the unexpected intimacies and innovations across familiar mediums that have turned out to be successful Hail Marys.
Keywords: Bleacher
n. A cheap bench seat at a sports arena, typically in an outdoor uncovered stand.
Bleachers — even empty ones — have a long history in American sports (they’ve been associated with baseball since the nineteenth century, sometimes to disastrous effect), but the concept of stands and stadia has been a part of democractic public spaces from the times of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Amphitheaters, from the Colosseum to the Roman Forum, were created as gathering spaces to watch entertainment ranging from gladiator games to army training.
Arenas — and raised stands in general — are fundamental to publicness, bringing together a pluralistic crowd reflective of the community outside of the stadium. They’ve even been instituted into other public spaces in cities, creating intimate, yet still public, settings within an urban center.
What’s Your Gameplan?
For the first few months of the pandemic, life, or a virtual facsimile, continued for most of us. One notable exception, of course, was live sports, a logistical nightmare amongst logistical nightmares. So when the NBA considered a remote, crowd-less “Bubble” makeup season, they turned to the king of logistics, Disney. It’s fascinating to see their innovative RFID technology, the MagicBand, put to work in the service of public health. Who would have thought that we’d all be rooting for Big Mouse’s surveillance powers to keep our athletes safe and healthy? And the NBA itself, with millions of dollars and its athletes’ safety on the line, has proven to be an unlikely innovator in the public health space. Now, in the midst of the NBA Finals, it’s easy to take for granted, but pause and consider this: There have been no positive coronavirus cases in a Bubble as large as 1,400 people in the middle of a state that’s one of the biggest hot spots in the country.
And while it’s physically and virally cloistered, the Bubble is kind of fun and weird too. Philadelphia 76ers rookie Matisse Thybulle’s YouTube show is equal parts Casey Neistat vlog and The Last Dance. It’s enthralling to see the ins and outs of this large-scale quarantine, which almost seems like a parallel world to the one the rest of us are living in, with effective and accessible testing and contact-tracing. Thybulle’s vlog also offers a glimpse into the honest, but edited, conversations about activism and Black Lives Matter happening within organizations. This level of intimacy and vulnerability at a time of extreme distance and alienation is unexpected from typically guarded professional athletes, but it’s welcome.
In any given match or game, there are only so many fans who can watch in person. But now, to have no one at all in the stands feels decisively weird, and each league is trying to mitigate that awkwardness in its own way. The NHL is on one end of the spectrum, with zero fans — or any substitute. “It kind of feels like I’m in a video game,” said Jordan Binnington of the St. Louis Blues.
Some MLB teams have attempted to fill the stands with something that at least visually rhymes with human fans. First Fox Sports applied video game tech to fill in digital placeholders, and some organizations are allowing fans to purchase cardboard cutouts of themselves to fill seats. Not to be outdone, the NBA courts are surrounded by giant screens showing life-sized, streaming video reactions from pre-selected fans at home. There’s plenty of innovation happening to be sure, but is any of it better than, or at least as good as, an in-person audience?
The interpersonal dynamics on display in the stands are central to what some scholars have called “the theater of public space.” Through various methods employed by the American sports leagues, what’s happening in the stands in this pandemic era can certainly be called “theater,” or at least entertainment. But As Kevin Draper writes in The Times, live audiences are the context that gives meaning to these events:
Walk-off grand slams now have all the emotional stakes of a first-inning single. U.F.C. fighters get no response from leaping atop the cage after a knockout, so they don’t even bother. A buzzer-beater for a team trying to make the playoffs generates all the atmosphere of cars whizzing by on a distant freeway.
Luckily, it’s not all sad, uncanny valley fandom. The NBA has taken the pains to build digital affordances that approximate the magic that happens when a mass of 3D fans meet in physical stands. The virtual patrons can use Microsoft Teams’ “Together Mode” which allows someone to turn to a stranger for a spontaneous high five and feel at least part of the buzz of being among strangers who care as much about something as you do. Even the sound that’s piped into the stadium to accompany the percussion score of squeaking sneakers consists of a blended track from virtual fans’ collective at-home exhortations for their teams — that sweet melody that emanates from the best of public spaces buzzing with human life.
What’s Clicking
🌐 Online
We live online — and it's what gives us any semblance of normalcy in this pandemic era. Hurricanes and blackouts mean enormous isolation. — The New York Times
Internet creators have never been able to trust the platforms they rely on. Now a former TikTok star is trying to imagine a world without the app. — MIT Technology Review
The company behind Fortnite dared Apple to shutter its game on iPhones. Now Apple has gone ahead and sort of done that. — Vox
🏙 Offline
As we’ve all essentially sheltered in place for the last five months, we need to reconsider what exactly the private home is. — Real Life
The cities and towns of Silicon Valley have thrived on the innovation that comes from having so much of the tech industry close by. But what happens when all of those companies go remote?— CityLab
The latest data from New York City antibody testing reflects the neighborhoods with the highest rates of coronavirus infection. Some are over 50%. — The New York Times
🔗 Linked
A new data privacy law in China looks a lot like Europe's GDPR. But will it stop state surveillance? — MIT Technology Review
An algorithm determined UK students' grades. Chaos ensued. — WIRED
A look at what the United States can learn from Europe about tech regulation, from international policy director at Stanford's Cyber Policy Center, Marietje Schaake. — The New Yorker
☞ This Week’s Double Click
This week, Apple's stock market value reached $2 trillion, which is double what it was at the start of the pandemic. As the economy has constricted, the tech giants have only cemented their power in it — and their influence on the way we all live. — The New York Times
Virtual DNC FTW?
Last week, we considered how politics could go remote, and this week was a major test, with the first-ever virtual Democratic National Convention.
Ahead of the convention, many, including us, were wondering what exactly a “virtual political convention” would look like. A political version of The Soup? A YouTube playlist of boring speeches? The verdict appears to be … somewhere in between. As Civic Hall co-founder Micah Sifry notes in this thread, the Dems definitely could have leaned into interactivity a bit harder:
But ultimately, there were some moments to fuel next week’s Zoom cocktail hour chatter. We liked the parts of the convention that took advantage of the constraints and medium and weren’t cover tracks of the Democrats’ greatest hits. In particular:
The celebrity emcee. We stan comedy legend and Maryland heiress Julia Louis-Dreyfus. The hosts provided human connection — and jokes — between disparate segments. While it sometimes looked like something close to a telethon, it usually worked for us.
The speeches that took advantage of the cameras. Even for the speakers who lack the discipline to kill a fly on camera, the figures who spoke personally to the voters behind the camera, in something approximating a one-on-one conversation, made the experience much more intimate.
The roll call. It could have been really monotonous, and come across as even more rote than normal. But in this virtual format, where speakers were beamed in from distinctive backgrounds to give unique and tailored speeches, the roll call became something of a personalized tour of the nation’s breadth and majesty. No, YOU’RE crying. We aren’t the only ones who rejoiced in the glory of the roll call!
Through forced experimentation, sports and political event organizers are learning about what presence and participation can look like, even as “live” mostly looks like absence. What do you think this all means for the future of fandom and live events? If in fact the pandemic is a portal, what’s on the other side? Drop us a comment below 👇🏽.
Subbing out,
The Civic Signals Team
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Illustrations by Josh Kramer
Civic Signals is a partnership between the Center for Media Engagement at the University of Texas, Austin, and the National Conference on Citizenship, and was incubated by New America. Please share this newsletter with your friends!