With a full month of incredible drama nearing an end it’s all too easy to feel a sense of anticlimax. In a way, some things never seem to change. England fans remain disappointed, the German team seem unable to ever have a bad tournament and you're left wondering if that HD subscription fee was really worth it. Yet for many there was something decidedly different about this year’s world cup. From a human point of view it was hard not to be humbled by the way South Africa embraced the tournament. Some 15 years on from that Rugby World Cup which promised the world a new South Africa free from the ghosts of the past, the country stands as a model of how reasoning and compromise can deliver magnificent results. One TV report before the opening game of this world cup showed poor, black fans in Soweto and affluent Afrikaans in Pretoria unified over one 90 minute match – who ever said it was just a game?
For us in the UK and many millions around the world, perhaps the thing that changed at this world cup was how we viewed and interacted with the drama. Just 4 years ago in Germany, the world cup could not reach people in the way it does now through Facebook and Twitter. Facebook was still closed to colleges and universities at the time and with Twitter still years away, MySpace provided the only ‘social’ online space for the world cup; which from my memory took the shape of some fairly mediocre mass advertising campaigns and little more.
In 2010, the world cup seems to have taken a step further towards becoming the truly global event it should be. Live streaming of the games set new records for bandwidth usage in Europe and North America, even causing some alarmists to suggest the wreaking of the web. Social media played an expectedly massive role. It continued to break down the traditional routes for delivering news, with as unlikelier source as Stan Collymore being in a position to announce to the nation via Twitter each England starting XI hours before any major media outlet. The savvier journalists have embraced these technologies, with many canvassing opinion before grilling Capello and co in news conferences, or leaking video filmed on their iPhones well before the 6 o’clock news.
Twitter itself groaned under massive demand. On June 14 a new record for tweets per minute was set as Japan beat Cameroon, only to be broken again 3 days later. Twitter’s engineers were accurately predicting problems, as the social network crashed more times in a one month period than ever before. On one occasion Holland’s victory over favourites Brazil brought the site down across the planet. 800,000 people watched England scrape through against Slovenia on the BBC website as offices and classrooms ground to a halt.
Yet beyond the bandwidth thirsty technology of the west, it was the BBC report from an orphanage outside of Johannesburg that will be my overriding memory of this tournament. As
someone who grew up watching sport on TV it’s not hard to explain why I love it so much. Yet
imagine having never seen a TV screen as a child even when you know millions can. If ever there was an argument for the need for digital information for all it is South Africa. After all, the
country’s past is a brutal illustration of what a lack of understanding can mean. Whilst some internet infrastructure will be left behind after this world cup, it is clearly not good enough that an event belonging to the people of South Africa
cannot be enjoyed by them in the same way as us. The young kids featured in that report clearly loved their first match, just think what a simple broadband connection would mean to them.
So as the stars fly off on their holidays and the media go their separate ways, South Africa remains a country with huge social and technological challenges ahead, but also as an example of how enthusiasm and unity over something a silly as a game of football can mean so, so much more. It remains the responsibility of us all to make sure that no one misses out.
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