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There are contactless payment systems (from sponsor Visa), freshly minted mini tablet-phones with easy videochat functions (from sponsor Samsung) and even, in the cycling arena, innovative battery-operated hot pants to keep competitors' thighs warm. Environmentally friendly speedsuits fashioned from plastic water bottles. Bendable barbells for weightlifters. The list goes on. When it comes to fresh tech, this is precisely the "World of Tomorrow" that our forebears were dreaming of. "Twenty years ago, we were in Barcelona looking at the first HD signals on a TV set," says Ed Hula, the editor of Around the Rings, a publication that covers the Olympics. "That's where this sort of stuff had its proving ground is in the Olympic theater," Hula says. "The Olympics provide that first step for new technology. It behooves the Samsungs and BMWs and others to make the most of this opportunity and have something to show people." They take full advantage on all platforms. Does Usain Bolt look great on the track? Then let's put him in a larger-than-life Visa ad, striding forward into the future holding a credit card in his hand as mall-walking Olympic visitors surge beneath him. Particularly useful that the passers-by are people of many colors, chatting in languages from Mandarin to Arabic to Portuguese. Like the World's Fairs, everyone plays a part in the show. "You've got global theater going on," says John J. Bodinger de Uriarte, an anthropologist at Susquehanna University in Selisgrove, Pa. He sees it as an effort to promote globalism
-- but a globalism that acknowledges, through resources expended and medals won, who the real powers are. "One way to look at the Olympics is an affirmation of the world order. We're competing equally
-- but wait a minute, we're also not," Bodinger says. But either way, "By having these heroic feats by people in many countries, you say, `Oh, well, this is possible.'" How the human story is told is one thing. But looking at the latest Olympics, what is the human story that's being told, exactly? It is one of amiable multiculturalism -- in pursuit of athletic excellence, yes, but also in the service of creating that many more potential consumers of products. It is a story in which the notion of corporate benevolence plays a key role, in which the hopefulness of the "Olympic truce" winks at politics without letting it consume the entire event. More than everything else, it is the can't-we-all-just-get-along aesthetic of a post-Benetton society, superimposed upon the most elegant iteration of the global shopping mall. World's Fairs do still exist. There is an organization in Paris called the Bureau of International Expositions that promotes them, including a reasonably successful one in Shanghai in 2010 and one set for Milan in 2015. But they are not the attention-getting global events they once were. Meanwhile, the Olympics seem more popular than ever. Why is that? Could it be that a society stitched together by airplanes and multipurpose data bytes no longer feels the need to gather explicitly to refresh its own story? Is that too top-down for the social-media era? Baskerville, the Welshman from the opening ceremony production team, thinks that's what a modern Olympics now offers. "We don't get many times to show what we're capable of," he says. "We're capable of horrible things as humans. And maybe this is something that unites us."
[Associated
Press;
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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