Sustaining Democracy in a Digital Age

After an extended period of frenzied fútbol fandom, this weekend marks the conclusion of the 2010 World Cup, as storied Spain takes the field on Sunday against the seemingly invincible Orange. Yet the pitch wasn’t the only place where this year’s World Cup proceedings played out over the past weeks, even months, of worldwide soccer mania.

 

Many of America’s most well-respected news outlets have offered the public World Cup blogs—from The New York Times’s Goal: The 2010 World Cup to The Washington Post’s Soccer Insider to The New Republic’s blog GoalPost—ranging in tone from the serious to the decidedly lighthearted. PBS NewsHour has attempted to compile a list of several online sources for World Cup coverage, and even a government professor at my alma mater got into the fray. Over a month ago Cornell professor Christopher Anderson launched SoccerQuantified.com, a blog devoted to the statistical analysis of the beautiful game.

 

In the four years since the last World Cup, blogs and online tools providing better, faster soccer coverage have multiplied, demonstrating the relatively recent emergence of the open distribution of data on the Internet. Soccer scores may not have the same importance in sustaining democracy as government data and political news, but government organizations and journalists alike might consider taking a look at the methods employed by soccer news outlets to distribute their information in a more user-friendly format.

 
The Guardian, for example, has offered up an endlessly entertaining and insightful application that shows a high-speed replay of what was going on in the World Cup Twittersphere during each match. Spain scores a goal: explosion of tweets with Spain-related keywords.

 

It is not hard to envision this app’s usefulness—both to news outlets and the general public—in tracking everything from election results to responses to the recent Supreme Court nominee hearings. However, it is also easy to see why the sports world, with its rabid fan bases and easily quantifiable events, has been the first arena (no pun intended) to embrace the use of social media and online tools.

 

Yet the basic purpose of all this new technology is to connect people, no matter their location or technological savvy, with the information they need; the tools themselves should make the information that is presented easier to understand. In this way, some sports news outlets’ tactics exemplify the approach that more news and government organizations should be taking.

 

Nieman Journalism Lab recently blogged about The Boston Globe’s efforts to globalize its soccer coverage; The Globe has expanded the reach of its World Cup coverage—the blog Corner Kicks—by using Google Translate to offer content in almost any language from A to Z. Since the popularity of soccer (and sports such as basketball and baseball) extends well beyond the English-speaking world, it is surprising that every news outlet in America didn’t follow The Globe’s example with their coverage of soccer, as well as content outside the sports world.

 

And though the now-famous German octopus was able to predict all of Germany’s match results accurately, there is no underwater creature that can see technology’s future role in the dissemination of information. Besides introducing the world to the legendary vuvuzela, this World Cup has taught us to look in unexpected places, like the sports world, for the next generation of open data tools. To all fans of the beautiful game, I say “Olé.”