Article

Communication & Sport

2015, Vol. 4(3) 243-260
New Media, Creativity, ª The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/2167479515576101
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Study into the Use of
#NBCFail During the
Sochi Winter Games

Katerina Girginova1

Abstract
The Olympic Games are not only the world’s biggest media event but now also the
world’s largest hypermedia (online, mobile, and social media) event, too. This pre-
sents a ripe context for the proliferation of new communication technologies and
creative practices, a phenomenon that has yet to receive systematic scholarly
treatment. By tracing the contours of one ray from the Olympic hypermedia
spectrum, the #NBCFail movement during the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics, this
article argues that the evolution and proliferation of the media and the voices telling
the Olympic story has resulted in an extension and renegotiation of the Olympic
narrative through various acts of global communicative creativity. Studying these
acts not only allows us to better understand the Olympic movement as an emergent
hypermedia event but also to (re)theorize creativity in an era of ubiquitous digital
communication.

Keywords
Olympics, hypermedia event, Sochi, Twitter, creativity

1
The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA

Corresponding Author:
Katerina Girginova, The Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, 3620 Walnut
Street, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA.
Email: kgirginova@asc.upenn.edu
244 Communication & Sport 4(3)

Introduction
So far this NBC telecast of the Olympic ceremony seems to be lacking something.

Oh yeah … the opening ceremony. #Sochi #NBCFail

For 2 weeks during the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games, viewers across the world
participated in the #NBCFail movement both in English and in Russian. By tracing
the evolution of #NBCFail, this article studies how creative acts on Twitter shape
modern hypermedia events and how hypermedia events present a ripe context for the
development of digital creativity.
As the world’s biggest media and hypermedia event, it is somewhat surprising that
the communicative milieu of the Games has yet to receive systematic scholarly treat-
ment. This article begins to fill this gap by engaging with one ray from the Olympic
hypermedia spectrum, the #NBCFail movement. Although its popularization is attrib-
uted to Steven Marx during London’s 2012 Olympic Games (O’Hallarn & Shapiro,
2014), the hashtag can be traced to the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. Furthermore,
the concept of using a hashtag to piece together the “real story” or to advocate certain
causes behind the edited coverage of an event can be seen in other cases, too (Brown
& Billings, 2013; Kraidy & Mourad, 2010). Thus, this article argues that the rise
of #NBCFail and its continuity 2 years later from London to Sochi is partly a function
of technology (i.e., convergence and cross-platform content) but also the result of
numerous creative Tweets by viewers.
By tracing the contours of the #NBCFail movement, we see that the proliferation
of media telling the Olympic story has resulted in a renegotiation of the Olympic nar-
rative through various acts of communicative creativity. Studying these acts not only
allows us to understand the Olympics as a hypermedia event but also to (re)theorize
creativity in an era of ubiquitous digital communication as quotidian, commercial,
and collaborative. The following sections examine the transformation of the Olym-
pics from a mega-event to a hypermedia event, introduce the idea of creativity in the
digital era, and delve into the #NBCFail case.

Review of Literature
From Mega-Events to Hypermedia Events
A mega-event is a large-scale cultural and often commercial event, with a dramatic
character, mass popular appeal, and international significance (Roche, 2000).
Mega-events offer both a narrative reflection upon political, cultural, and historical
climates—as Roche (2000) states they are the official versions of public culture—
and a vision of the future. They thus carry the plausibility of change.
Mega-events are by definition international, with large multicultural audiences that
serve to develop a global culture. Yet, since megasport events like the Olympics
(Eastman, Newton, & Pack, 1996) celebrate “nations” and specific “cultures,” they
Girginova 245

simultaneously reaffirm nationalistic boundaries and our sense of place. What makes
mega-events so powerful is precisely their liminality, which creates shared experi-
ences (communitas; Chalip, 2006), underpinned by sense of place and self.
Still, mega-events can be seen from another perspective, namely, as platforms for
the creation and launch of various innovations. In a pretelevision era, the world fair
was the main platform for the international exhibition of creativity; it was the original
mega-event. The Olympic Games have now largely supplanted this function of the
world fair in part, due to the mediation made possible through broadcast television.
Thus, the Olympics are now the world’s primary mega and media event, with historic
connections to practices of creativity.
Indeed, most people experience the Olympics via some form of media—an esti-
mated 3.6 billion people tuned into the London Games on television (International
Olympic Committee [IOC] Marketing Report, 2012). Furthermore, with 47% of the
Olympic revenue coming directly from broadcasting fees (Olympic.org, n.d.), media
play such a central role to the sustainability of the movement that it is reasonable to
assume there is no longer a clear distinction between the “real” and the “mediated”
Olympics. This blurring has been referred to as the “hyperreality” of the Olympics
(Ho, 2011). Understanding the significance of Olympism thus requires an under-
standing of its DNA as a media event.
“Media events are a unique media genre that results when television’s visual and
narrative power taps into public fascination with a story that transcends daily experi-
ence” (Rivenburgh, 2002, pp. 31–32). Dayan and Katz (1992) add that media events
can be understood as social, political, and technological phenomena. They are the
“high holidays of mass communication” (p. 1) that spotlight some central value, idea-
lized version of society, or some aspect of collective memory. As such, they need
some level of collective authentication; audiences must at least partially buy into the
event narrative for it to be sustainable. As Billings (2008) suggests, media events are
written by the winners, television producers, and, we can now add, the audience.
Nonetheless, Dayan & Katz have been criticized for not fully accounting for the
complex role played by broadcasters or audiences in shaping media event experiences
(Couldry, Hepp, & Krotz, 2009). They also do not account for the introduction
of hypermedia (as a top-down strategic form of organizational communication and
as a bottom-up, citizen driven initiative) into the Olympic broadcasting repertoire
(Peaslee & Kredell, 2014).
Since media channel and narrative expansion seem to be an inherent part of the
Olympics—the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Charter mandates the IOC
to secure “the fullest coverage by the different media and the widest possible audience
in the world,” (2013, p. 92)—this continuously impacts their communicative ecosys-
tem. Thus, we need a new approach for understanding this communicative milieu, a
modified hypermedia event.
Kraidy and Mourad (2010) describe a hypermedia event as taking place on online,
mobile, and social media. For example, the Olympics in London 2012 was not only
the most watched television event in U.S. history but also the “largest online, social
246 Communication & Sport 4(3)

media, and mobile event” (Tang & Cooper, 2013, p. 855). Similarly, the 2014 Games
in Sochi continued the trend of online and broadcast media expansion by setting a
Winter Olympics record with over 1,539 hours of coverage across a range of media
platforms (NBC Universal Press Release, 2013).
A hypermedia event is different from a traditional media event in that it has mul-
tiple entry points to the debate, which results in possibilities for numerous voices and
discourses (Kraidy & Mourad, 2010). It also has the potentiality of being much more
disjointed narratively speaking because it offers multiple viewpoints simultaneously.
Consequently, hypermedia events tend to become predominantly contentious as
opposed to celebratory.
Still, this definition does not allow us to fully account for hypermedia events such
as the Olympics. Therefore, this article proposes one important new dimension to the
notion of a hypermedia event: global, digital creativity. This addition can be further
broken down into two components. First, a hypermedia event like the Olympics is a
combination of planned communicative elements (i.e., the broadcasting of the
Games), with ad hoc, communicative responses (i.e., Twitter followers’ comments).
Second, due to the mix of planned and unplanned communicative elements and the
blurring of time and place, Olympic-style hypermedia events harbor and thrive upon
the possibility, on an unmatched scale, for the generation of novel ideas through the
creative convergence of content in a transmedia environment.
This new creative milieu is exemplified by the fact that while the Olympic Games
of 1908 in London took place over 6 months, the Games in 2012 happened in 2 weeks
(Roche, 2008). Television broadcasts allow for a compression of time and an exten-
sion of place (Bly, Harrison, & Irwin, 1993), which also invites larger global audi-
ences. Hypermedia events further alter this context by simultaneously extending
and blurring synchronic time and physical space, allowing for even more nuanced
ways of accessing, interpreting, and interacting with content (Manovich, 2001).
Among other things, global, digital creativity can certainly be an enjoyable and
rewarding practice, which nonetheless carries its own consumer logics. These points
are central to the argument this article makes about global creativity in our digital era
and will be expanded upon further. Before that, a word on transitions.
The transition between a mega, media, and hypermedia event is certainly not a
seamless one and not one that is experienced equally by everyone. There are no single
“Olympic Games” (MacAloon, 1984; Rivenburgh, 2002) and increasingly the Olympic
narrative is becoming tangled between at least two conflicting images: one is top-down
and elitist and the other is bottom-up, more egalitarian but often trouble ridden (Girgi-
nov, 2013; Price & Dayan, 2008). Real (1998) asserts that the universal Olympic ideal,
originally established in 19th-century modernist thought, is unsustainable in the post-
modern era, which is suspicious of grand narratives. The question then arises: What
is the right communicative balance for creating a sustainable Olympic narrative?
The adaptation of hypermedia within the Olympic communicative milieu can at
once present opportunities for the Games to open their narratives to the public and
in turn to evolve beyond their increasingly distant, mythological origins. However,
Girginova 247

this change in communicative structures certainly makes the Olympic narrative vul-
nerable to being “hijacked” (Price & Dayan, 2008). It is precisely at this point of ten-
sion that the following case study interjects. By analyzing the evolution of one
hashtag as a case study for the creative coproduction of a hypermedia event, we can
glimpse into the nature of the modern Olympic experience and into one form of what
it means to be creative in our digital era.

Creativity in the Digital Era

Creativity, understood as the generation of new ideas (Amabile, 1996), is fundamen-
tally a communicative practice. This means that the creative process and product are
both built upon a foundation of communication, and it follows that if the communi-
cative components change then the practice of creativity will see some alteration, too.
Thus, it is important to critically investigate what this alteration entails in the context
of a global hypermedia event and in turn to tease out some broader implications about
the nature of creativity in the digital era. The following section sketches out a brief
conceptual scaffolding for understanding digital creativity by borrowing from the
work of Burgess (2006), de Certeau (1984), and Runco (2004).
According to Burgess (2006, p. 6), creativity is “the process by which available
cultural resources (including both ‘material’ resources, content, and immaterial
resources, genre conventions and shared knowledges) are recombined in novel
ways.” In essence, creativity is a combinatory process and this paper suggests that
hypermedia events allow for new types of communicative combinations to occur
which, in turn, make creativity a key feature of their output. Burgess’ concept of “ver-
nacular creativity” presents this as a productive process of combining old and new
media practices. It is an embodied action that reduces the distance between mass cul-
tural production and daily experiences with digital technologies.
Although not as outright contesting, the idea of vernacular creativity can be traced
back to de Certeau (1984) who details how small, daily acts of subversion can resist the
dominant cultural and political forces within which we find ourselves. Two of the cen-
tral tenets from de Certeau’s work, tactics and language, are particularly relevant to our
understanding of creativity. First, tactics are described as ways of getting by, as small,
daily acts of subversion that chip away at the dominant status quo. Tactics are a part of
the overall ways of operating, which “constitute innumerable practices by means of
which users re-appropriate the space organized by techniques of sociocultural produc-
tion” (de Certeau, 1984, p. xiv). Interestingly, this is not something done in isolation but
rather something that de Certeau sees as a form of collective action. This is important in
the present context because it allows us to capture a key dynamic of Twitter and the
#NBCFail movement: the mass scale upon which contesting communicative acts occur.
For de Certeau, economic imperatives are not in opposition or even separate from
daily creative acts; they are a necessary condition offering the very opposition against
which the daily acts of subversion can occur. “Users make innumerable and infinite-
simal transformations of and within the dominant cultural economy in order to adopt
248 Communication & Sport 4(3)

it to their own interest and their own rules,” (de Certeau, 1984, p. xiv). de Certeau
notes that there exists a gap between a consumer’s prescribed and actual use of a prod-
uct. Hence, consumption is not understood through its own products but rather
through our ways of using them. Although this type of subversion is certainly limited
in scope because it still operates within a circumscribed market ecology, it does give
room for some agency to those involved.
Second, de Certeau describes language as the conduit for creativity. He makes
the parallel between language and daily acts of subversion, each being able to pro-
duce novel combinations but ultimately operating within boundaries. In the case of
language, the boundaries and impetus for creative acts come in the form of “an
established vocabulary,” (1984, p. xiii). In the case of daily acts of status quo sub-
version, the boundaries and ignition can be found in our capitalist societal struc-
tures: “consumers are transformed into immigrants. The system in which they
move about is too vast to be able to fix them in one place, but too constraining
for them ever to be able to escape from it and go into exile elsewhere. There is
no longer an elsewhere” (p. 40).
The notions of digression and problematization of the status quo are further devel-
oped by Runco (2004) who defines creativity as both the act of discovering a problem
and the process of solving it. Runco (2004, p. 675) urges us to distinguish between
three necessary but alone insufficient preconditions for creativity, namely, problem
identification (noting an issue), problem definition (making a problem operationaliz-
able), and problem redefinition (making it workable). Although this is quite a utilitar-
ian definition of creativity, it serves to reify the concept and to bridge the gap between
the internal or conceptual problem-solving level and the external or practical
problem-solving level.
In sum, Runco (2004) sees creativity as a form of problem solving, de Certeau sees
this process as collective, subversive, and within bounded frameworks including lan-
guage and capitalism, and Burgess helps us translate these ideas into the digital realm.
What is missing from these works, however, is a global account for the practice of
creativity and a focus on the variety of fundamental communicative processes driving
it. Therefore, this article defines digital creativity as mediated communicative acts of
problematization and problem solving and begins to fill these gaps by studying the
rise in the international #NBCFail movement.

Method
This study uses a qualitative research design (Robson, 2011) to trace the thematic
development of #NBCFail across English and Russian Tweets during the Sochi
Olympics. The study is both diachronic in that it traces the evolution of the hashtag
#NBCFail since its inception and synchronic in that it concentrates on selected peri-
ods of time. While other similar hashtags, such as #SochiProblems, do exist, this arti-
cle specifically focuses on #NBCFail because it is directly connected to the
hypermedia event and can be read as a complimentary production effort.
Girginova 249

Data were collected through Twitter’s streaming application program interface

(API), which allows for historic Tweet queries that are publicly available to be cap-
tured. According to Morstatter, Pfeffer, and Liu (2014, p. 1), Twitter “returns Tweets
matching a query provided by the Streaming API user … Once the volume of the
query surpasses 1% of all of the tweets on Twitter, the response is sampled.”. A total
of 597 Tweets were captured from Twitter’s API search site, grouped under the
#NBCFail hashtag: 454 in English and 143 in Russian.
Since there were considerably more Tweets available in English, some additional
sampling decisions had to be made, which meant that all Russian Tweets available
from Twitter’s API search during the 2 weeks of the Sochi Winter Olympics (Febru-
ary, 7–23, 2014) were analyzed but the Tweets considered in English were made up of
three segments of equally spaced time intervals (February 7–9, February 14–16, and
February 21–23). These dates were chosen specifically because they encapsulated the
opening and closing ceremonies of the Games as well as the three consecutive Fri-
day–Sunday periods.
Aronson’s (1994) four steps for thematic analysis (collect, identify, combine and
catalogue, and construct) were then applied. All data, including text and images, were
broadly considered as text (Fairclough, 1992), which allowed for them to be included
in the larger narrative of #NBCFail. Tweets were then analyzed iteratively to establish
emergent themes and codes (Brown & Billings, 2013; Robson, 2011) and reanalyzed
and condensed into appropriate categories (Krippendorff, 2013). Where necessary,
Tweets were categorized under multiple themes. The codes comprising each theme
and its frequency can be seen in Table 1.
The following section presents a discussion of the four emergent themes: media-
tion, cooptation of the commercial, problem solving, and nationalism.

Findings
Mediation
Mediation is at the heart of this story. It was the impetus for the #NBCFail movement,
the target of disgruntled customers and citizens, and the weapon that made it possible
for Olympic viewers across the world to coalesce around a virtual meeting point to
voice their thoughts. Quite similar to McNutt’s (2013) findings around the #NBCFail
movement during the London Games, one of the main reasons driving the outrage on
Twitter was the apparentness of the mediation, to the point where it interfered with
what viewers perceived as reality.

#NBCFail lives!’ Olympics tradition returns as NBC skips

live feed of Sochi opening ceremony bit.ly/1bCDtQx

“The #NBCFail hashtag was in part a response to the segmentation of the viewing
audience, revealing not simply the fact that liveness was being mediated—which is
250 Communication & Sport 4(3)

Table 1. Coding Scheme.

itself uneventful—but also that access to that liveness was being limited by factors
beyond simply a time delay” (McNutt, 2013, p. 124). Media provide a framework
for the ordering of time and space (Silverstone, 2005), so if they violate their own
set of rules for “liveness” and “reality,” in a hypermedia world, the audience
responds.
Many of the Tweets in English and Russian were devoted to uncovering and pie-
cing together what had actually happened versus what NBC had shown. Further, the
most frequently tweeted message in English, aside from the opening ceremony edi-
torial remarks, was a criticism toward the reporter who pushed U.S. alpine skier Bode
Miller to talk about the loss of his brother, which resulted in his public break down.
Viewers suggested the reporter had engineered this response, which was an inap-
propriate mediation of the athlete and his personal grievances.
Mediation also emerged as a theme in the findings through the processes of conflu-
ence and convergence. There is a dialectical movement between Twitter, blogs, and
more traditional media: #NBCFail gained attention due to being picked up as a news
story by larger media outlets. In turn, #NBCFail supplied those outlets with stories
while borrowing its own content from blogs and NBC. Nonetheless, transmedia crea-
tivity requires access to and literacy of different media, not to mention linguistic and
cultural competencies. In essence, it requires a level of cooptation into the commercial.
Girginova 251

Cooptation of the Commercial

It is important to highlight the official partnership between Twitter and NBC, that
NBC describes as providing “a different perspective of the Olympics,” (NBC Sports
Press Release, 2014, n.p.), which allows “users of those platforms to engage, speak
about and cover the Olympics in original ways,” (NBC Sports Press Release, 2014, n.
p.). Yet, part of the irony behind the #NBCFail movement lies in the very need for
consumption. Arguably, to be an effective and influential part of the #NBCFail cri-
tique, one needs to have cutting edge access to and literacy of the very content that
is being discussed, which probably means being an NBC subscriber.
This raises interesting implications for the relationship between creativity and
commercialism—two concepts often seen in opposition. Billings (2014) argues that
Twitter research is often caught in the pendulum between utopian (liberating and
socially advantageous) and dystopian (market and corporate driven) conclusions.
However, these two positions are not necessarily incommensurable but rather
mutually formative, especially for the development of digital acts of creativity.
Whether a level of consumerism gives one the access, tools, and knowledge to be
creative or the drive to rebel against consumerism is up for debate, but it still func-
tions as an impetus for creativity. By engaging with either an NBC subscription or
a Twitter account, one is quite literally contractually coopted into a market-driven cor-
porate logic and space.
The idea of a symbiotic relationship between creativity and commercialism can be
seen on a broader level, too. For instance, despite the popularity of the #NBCFail
movement during the London Games, NBC ratings actually saw an increase in
2012 and turned a profit. Jim Bell, NBC’s executive Olympic producer of the London
and Sochi Games, responded to the #NBCFail movement by saying “it got a little
noisy and loud out there,” (McNutt, 2013, pp. 124–125), and while NBC “can under-
stand and appreciate that people are passionate about things … I think the numbers
speak for themselves,” (McNutt, 2013, pp. 124–125). The case in Sochi was some-
what similar and it could be argued that despite the fact that many of the #NBCFail
Tweets carried negative sentiments toward NBC, they nonetheless drove viewership
even if for no other reason than to provide viewers with new material to critique.

Problem Solving
Creative acts in the form of problematization and problem-solving Tweets about NBC’s
Olympic coverage were frequently seen in the context of #NBCFail. Perhaps, the most
common acts were problematizations of NBC’s editorial decisions; NBC’s presenters
were frequently and aggressively criticized and the editorial team’s revision and schedul-
ing decisions were lamented and sometimes ridiculed visually and verbally.

Russian imperialism is about to be swept away by …

this commercial break? Are you effin kidding me?! #NBCFail #Olympics
252 Communication & Sport 4(3)

Oh, #NBCFail. Interviewer just asked the women’s

hockey team coach about “your girls.”

In the English sample of the Tweets, there appeared to be a drive, if not a competition,
among participants to uncover the next big “fail.” Once such a fail was uncovered and
picked up traction among Twitter followers, the general topic of Tweets changed
direction; often, problematic topics on #NBCFail such as the edited opening cere-
mony reached temporary closure by redefinition. As one tweeter noticed, this very
process of gaffe discovery through #NBCFail was an enjoyable activity in and of
itself:

#NBCFail Must Become an Official Olympic Sport

#OlympicsExp #Sochi2014 #OpeningCeremony

Hutchins and Rowe (2012, p. 4) note, “the traditional conception of sport and media
has given way to sport as media within a broader leisure framework.” Participants
seemed to derive pleasure from the satirical act of being a part of the movement. For
them, #NBCFail was an important complementary, if not primary, part of the Olympic
experience. Gratification was obtained through belonging to the #NBCFail commu-
nity, not unlike the euphoric communal feeling associated with rituals, festivals, and
mega-events (Durkheim, 1895/1982; MacAloon, 1984).

Short shameful confession: I wasn’t excited about the Olympics

until I realized #NBCFail was back

Another frequently voiced problem in the English Tweets was the inability to watch
events live on television or online without paying an NBC subscription fee. This
problem was met with collaborative solutions by participants who suggested going
to various websites to stream the Games live, changing virtual private network (VPN)
addresses to access other countries’ online coverage, or subscribing to different
national broadcasting services.

@LucyWuto hell with #NBCOlympics if you are in the States, use fromsport.com, they
have all events live as they happen #NBCFail

tenplay.comau/sport/sochi-20 … Australia, Britain and Canada

have streams for free on TEN, BBC and CBC #NBCFail

Much of the momentum around #NBCFail seemed to be a function of dispersed par-

ticipation. This resulted in loosely collaborative acts of creativity, which were not
orchestrated by any one individual but were formed as an amalgamation of many
Girginova 253

smaller ideas and actions. Notably, around 41% of the total English and 36% of the
total Russian Tweets were some form of a retweet. While the retweet figures were
difficult to fully account for due to some small wording changes, the idea of retweet-
ing a message could be read as form of problem solving in itself because it spreads a
solution to new networks of people.

For those keeping track, so far NBC has cut the entire Russian

Military Drumline, and the entire Rachmaninoff Tribute.

#NBCFail #Sochi2014

Other notable collective action was the group identification, problematization, and
piecing together of the edited coverage. NBC’s edits included the removal of the
Soviet era act from the opening ceremony, the absence of the Olympic mascots, a
missing performance by t.A.T.u (a supposedly gay Russian band), the disappearance
of the Russian police choir singing “Get Lucky” (which became a YouTube sensa-
tion), and the editing of IOC President Thomas Bach’s speech where he referred to
the IOC being committed to equal human rights. The latter omission prompted some
reactions on Twitter and raised an important question: If promoting human equality is
a priority for the United States, why did NBC edit out segments of the opening cere-
mony, which alluded to and supported this initiative? NBC’s response was that the
decision was based on time and viewer interest.
The majority of the Tweets did appear to come from individuals with very few
societal groups, such as human rights advocates, trying to coopt the hashtag. Some
notable exceptions were Tweets from the official accounts of other media organiza-
tions, like Russian Television, which took #NBCFail as an opportune platform for the
promotion of their own network’s coverage instead. This was more frequently
encountered in Russian than in English Tweets.
A surprising finding—or lack thereof—in the Tweets was the scarcity of mentions of
human and gay rights on Twitter compared to the prominence these issues received in
the mainstream media. Twitter, instead, seemed to be more concerned with the produc-
tion values and the mediation of the event rather than these broader political issues sur-
rounding the Olympics. Nonetheless, some comments were present about gay rights. In
Russian, for instance, a humorous and creative play on symbols was established between
NBC’s rainbow-colored peacock emblem and the editing of Thomas Bach’s speech,
which alluded to the IOC’s support for equal human rights. This Tweet included the cap-
tion that the peacock’s wings were cut (referring to NBC’s colorful peacock emblem).

Павлин обрезал крылья. #NBCFail http://j.mp/1f8RF1s

(The peacock had his wings cut)

254 Communication & Sport 4(3)

In a Washington Post article, Farhi (2014) notes that in contrast to Twitter’s

#NBCFail coverage of Sochi, where controversial issues were at the forefront,
NBC’s broadcast coverage pushed controversial issues to the margins, where
smaller audiences convened in the late hours of the night. This would suggest that
Twitter users established an oppositional experience to the main Olympic event but
perhaps, such a conclusion might be hasty to make. First, the findings from this
study do not necessarily support the idea that only politically controversial issues
dominated the #NBCFail hashtag. Further, the relatively short life span of Tweets
and the lack of issue coordination made the hashtag a difficult place for sustained
and effective issue voicing.
Second, the comparison between Twitter and NBC coverage makes one wonder
whether it is right to seek such controversial coverage of the Olympics on NBC in
the first place. Russian expert Hill argues “the Olympics might be the wrong place
to look for a greater sociopolitical understanding of the host nation. No one saw les-
sons about British colonialism in London (during the 2012 Summer Games) or the
torturous history of the settling of the American West in Salt Lake City (site of the
Winter Olympics) in 2002” (Farhi, 2014, n.p.). So why expect it about Russia from
NBC?
The level to which the Olympic platform should be used for contestation is indeed
a historical issue for the Olympic movement. Prior to the Sochi Games, the IOC pres-
ident said “we are grateful to those who respect the fact that sport can only contribute
to the development of peace if it’s not used as a stage for political dissent, or for trying
to score points in internal or external contexts” (Bondy, 2014, n.p.). Perhaps, a more
fruitful approach would be to acknowledge that the Games have long been coopted
for political purposes and to try to better understand what makes certain cooptation
efforts more or less successful.

Nationalism
The thread of nationalism is tightly interwoven throughout many of the Tweets
in both languages; however, the emphasis among them differs. As noted by
Roche (2000, p. 6), “the development of international mega-events parallels the
growth and spread of ‘modernity’ and nation-state consciousness.” Differences
in national Olympic online media coverage certainly further highlight the
notion of the nation (Eagleman, 2013). While the ability to Tweet is largely not
tied to any specific geographical location, the language in the Tweets nonethe-
less frequently erected and reinforced its own national boundaries in cyber-
space. The concept of “banal nationalism” additionally explicates this point
(Billig, 1995).
Although the biggest topic of discussion across the Russian and English Tweets
was a response to the edits noted earlier, the tone and emphasis between the output
from the two languages differed significantly. The English Tweets were often humor-
ous and sarcastic and were concerned with the inability to watch the Olympic events
Girginova 255

live, whereas the Russian Tweets seemed to be more serious and critical of the Amer-
ican media and political systems as opposed to NBC alone. The most popular Russian
Tweet was a variation of:

как в США раскромсали открытие Олимпиады в Сочи

((here is) how the USA chopped up (edited out) the opening ceremony of the Olympic
Games in Sochi)

The various versions and retweets of this message would then have a link to an article,
most often written by a popular blogger, with further information about what had
been edited. The idea of retweeting how a Russian performance was contentiously
edited by an American network seemed to spark some nationalistic solidarity.
According to the sample obtained through Twitter’s API search the majority of the
complaints about the edits to the Games began to surface in Russian around February
9, the day that a prominently retweeted blog was posted by Nikolai Kamnev. Notably,
this is about 2 days after the opening ceremony and the surfacing of the same com-
plaints in English. In other words, piecing together what happened during the opening
significantly lagged behind the events themselves.
Another way to conceive of this discrepancy is as a function of mediation. Here,
we may borrow from Martín-Barbero (1993, p. 187), who describes the concept of
“mediations,” as “the articulations between communication practices and social
movements and the articulation of different tempos of development with the plurality
of cultural practices.” Hence, while hypermedia allow for a consolidation of people
and ideas, they also create gaps of space and time between those who participate and
those who do not. The chronological flexibility and transfer across media only serves
to additionally splinter the narrative.
The angst in the English language Tweets about the United States lagging behind
other countries time and information-wise further illustrates this strand of nationalism:

As an American, I’d love to see the Olympics Now Please

Tinyurl.com/nhbvuyr #sochi2014 #olympics #NBCFail

The confluence here of NBC with Americanness and patriotism is intriguing on many
levels not least because of the historical ties of NBC to the United States as its first
broadcast network (McNutt, 2013). According to McNutt, these ties are “prominently
reinforced through its (NBC’s) status as America’s Olympic broadcaster, as the
Olympics and other international sporting events are one of the last spaces in which
the ‘nation’ remains a prominent figure in an increasingly fragmented, narrowcasted
environment” (McNutt, 2013, p. 125).
The Russian Tweets seemed to evoke a sense of hypocrisy, some even going as far
as calling Western media “racist,” and a desire for recognition and a just media
256 Communication & Sport 4(3)

coverage. The main complaint was that Russia was often the country presented by the
Western media as being antidemocratic and stifling to freedom of speech, however,
certain instances such as NBC’s arguably political edits to the Games hinted at a form
of “censorship” in the United States, too. Indeed, censorship was a key word that
appeared in many of the Russian Tweets, alluding to a broader critique of Western
and American democracy.

Цензура от #NBC Церемонии Открытия Олимпийских Игр в #Сочи2014 . Так в

какой стране правит диктатура? #NBCFail

(Censorship from #NBCFail Olympics opening ceremony in #Sochi2014. So which

county is a dictatorship?)

Бедных гражданам СЩА промывает мозги пропаганды. Пытаясь показатъ Олим-

пиаду в Сочи с худшей строны.

(Poor US citizens, brainwashed by the propaganda machine trying to show

Sochi in the worst light.)

Nevertheless, the Russian tweeters in these cases were in an interesting position; on

one hand, many of them were at an advantage because they had access to communi-
cation in English and in Russian and could participate in either language. On the other
hand, those who chose to Tweet in Russian were also at a disadvantage because they
were somewhat silenced to Western audiences due to language barriers. This suggests
that not all digital communication acts are created equal.

Conclusion
By tracing the evolution of #NBCFail, one small fraction of the Sochi Winter Olympics
hypermedia event, we emerge with a picture of creativity as quotidian, enjoyable, and
problem-solving oriented. Further, it appears as loosely collaborative and commercially
infused. The findings suggest that #NBCFail establishes itself as a complimentary, yet
dependent, and ultimately reinforcing production and viewing experience to NBC’s
official broadcast, one which remediates, renarrates, and recreates Sochi’s Winter
Olympics. #NBCFail owns its power to a conglomerate of creative problematization
and problem-solving acts, which help to transform the Olympics into a hypermedia
event. Humor, sarcasm, and cross-platform content tactics often facilitated the small,
communicative acts of creativity, which ultimately amassed into the #NBCFail
movement.
We may conceptualize the creativity behind the #NBCFail community as a
communicative act on several levels: first, as an act which is created through
novel combinations of communication (for example, Tweeting a funny comment
with a link to a blog); second, as an act which is transmitted through
Girginova 257

communication (and communication technologies); and third, as an act which has

as its primary purpose the communication of an idea. In other words, communi-
cation is the product and process of creativity, and the changes in communication
flows are what distinguish a hypermedia event from the earlier renditions of
mega or media events.
Yet, whose creativity are we talking about? #NBCFail is steeped in Western technol-
ogies, participants, and perspectives, and the samples of English and Russian Tweets
highlighted some intercultural differences in uses and understandings of the movement,
suggesting there are cultural specificities in our practices and conceptualizations of crea-
tivity. In their mission, the Olympics strive to be universal which, by definition, implies
some standardization and imposes some culturally laden (typically Western) values.
This makes one wonder could there ultimately be a truly global creativity enabled
through hypermedia events and the digital mixing of peoples, practices, and places?
Also important to consider is what does studying #NBCFail really tell us? Billings
(2014) argues that we are in a state of systemic hyperbole about the adoption rates and
impacts of Twitter on sports programming and while the presence of Twitter is now
mainstream—as Durkheim (1895/1982) would say it has become a social fact—its
use is not. We need only look at the number of Twitter users to remind ourselves that
just about 18% of Americans in 2013 had an account (Duggan & Smith, 2013) and
only less than half of them were actively using it.
Let us make no mistake; in this hypermedia event, television still rules. Sochi’s
digital audience was 305 million, whereas its television audience was 2.1 billion
(Sochi 2014 Global Broadcast & Audience Report, 2014). Therefore, the actual par-
ticipants, audience, and impact of the hashtag were relatively small. Still, while
#NBCFail is but one ray in the spectrum of Sochi’s hypermedia event, it is particu-
larly insightful not least because it can help us find new and more appropriate
approaches for understanding modern hypermedia events. Moreover, many of the
people using Twitter are early adopters of technological innovations (Boris, 2014).
Therefore, their communicative practices may be indicative of what is to come for
broadcasts of hypermedia events beyond the Olympic Games.
Future research could address methodological issues associated with Twitter
and experiment with different sized samples. It could also explore further the inter-
cultural dimensions of creativity on Twitter by comparing additional languages—a
limitation of this study for practical reasons. Furthermore, research focusing on
issues of media literacy and how and through whom Twitter messages spread could
be quite insightful. After all, movements such as #NBCFail are an interesting phenom-
enon to study not simply because of the confluence of technologies that enables them but
rather because of the types of creative communication they enable along with their scale
and global reach.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
258 Communication & Sport 4(3)

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

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