An hour into the first of last year's AVP beach volleyball tournaments a warning clickthrough page appeared on the event's Amazon Prime Video page. Amazon' had been covering the AVP tournaments since 2018, but the pandemic forced a strict spectator-less bubble. During the previous two years they hadn't spared any expense. Now they had to keep viewers engaged. Rather than using sampled crowd audio and cutout spectators, they they focused on highlighting the event's audio. A sports audio specialist was brought in and dozens of microphones were installed on the main court, players chairs, coaches, referees, along with a number of moving microphones. The first match immediately was sprinkled with some rather colorful language - enough to trigger Amazon's warning clickthrough.
Watching the matches was something of a revelation. Sounds of the game ranging from sound normally masked by crowd noise to coaches discussing tactics with players during timeouts. The announcers had been coached to work around the new sound field. By the end of the first tournament the viewer experience was excellent. Similar things happened in other sports that took the "honest" route. Viewership often increased, while many of the major sports saw drops. Now NBC and other large networks around the world have to deal with an Olympics with empty stadiums. How will they react? A miscalculation could damage viewer engagement. It's a very interesting social technology experiment.
It turns out a lot of work has been done over the past sixty years. Sports like football (not the American variety), tennis, rowing, past Olympic games, and online games have driven innovation. Seven years ago 99% Invisible aired a radio documentary produced by Peregrine Andrews on the sound of sports. It's fascinating and worth the hour. Listen with stereo headphones or earbuds.
There's another fascinating question. How do athletes react to empty stadiums? That experiment has been underway for a year now. It's not simple.
dismantling democracy
Henry Farrell and Bruce Schneier on the current Republican effort to damage and possibly destroy democracy.
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American democracy’s vulnerability to disinformation has been very much in the news since the Russian disinformation campaign in 2016. The fear is that outsiders, whether they be foreign or domestic actors, will undermine our system by swaying popular opinion and election results.
This is half right. American democracy is an information system, in which the information isn’t bits and bytes but citizens’ beliefs. When peoples’ faith in the democratic system is undermined, democracy stops working. But as information security specialists know, outsider attacks are hard. Russian trolls, who don’t really understand how American politics works, have actually had a difficult time subverting it.
When you really need to worry is when insiders go bad. And that is precisely what is happening in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. In traditional information systems, the insiders are the people who have both detailed knowledge and high level access, allowing them to bypass security measures and more effectively subvert systems. In democracy, the insiders aren’t just the officials who manage voting but also the politicians who shape what people believe about politics. For four years, Donald Trump has been trying to dismantle our shared beliefs about democracy. And now, his fellow Republicans are helping him.
Democracy works when we all expect that votes will be fairly counted, and defeated candidates leave office. As the democratic theorist Adam Przeworski puts it, democracy is “a system in which parties lose elections.” These beliefs can break down when political insiders make bogus claims about general fraud, trying to cling to power when the election has gone against them.
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08:02 in Current Affairs, General Commentary, hacks | Permalink | Comments (0)