Last week, Michael Newman began his Media and Cultural Studies seminar at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee with a simple question: How many students were watching the Beijing Olympics on television? One hand went up. Then he asked how many had seen videos from the Beijing Games on YouTube or social media. Almost every student raised their hand.
Over the past two weeks, I’ve seen article after article touting the record low television ratings for NBC’s Olympics coverage. Those articles are accurate, and they tell an important business story. Almost every network television program, with the singular exception of NFL broadcasts, is attracting smaller traditional viewership numbers. The Olympics broadcasts specifically also faced enormous headwinds: The Tokyo Games aired just last year, the ongoing pandemic has disrupted all of our lives, and China’s blatant disregard of human rights added a repulsive element to this year’s festivities.
But there’s another, slightly different type of article that’s proliferated both this year and during the 2021 Tokyo Games, a genre of story that takes it as a given that no one is watching the Olympics. That’s completely inaccurate. As I told the Washington Post last week, it’s possible that the 2022 Olympics will be one of the most-watched events in U.S. history. It’s just that we’re watching on our phones and in our browsers.
The idea that “watching TV” requires a box on a pedestal or a panel on a wall remains so deeply engrained in our minds that a snippet of video consumed some other way feels like it doesn’t count. But fundamentally, it’s all the same. Somebody gets paid to relay a video signal through a transmission process and distribution channel that ultimately monetizes our attention when we click (or scroll) to watch. The final leg in that process—the distribution hardware—is a screen. And screens, in case you haven’t noticed, are…