Recipes for Systemic Change - Helsinki Design Lab

D5.5 Media, Sports & CelebrityMedia consumption is rapidly moving closer to online platforms andaway from traditional paper media. Popular magazines still capture a significantportion of Finnish youth.Professional sports and sports coverage is an area of great interestamong young Finns, especially among young men.Ice hockey is extremely popular in Finland, which currently ranksfourth in the International Hockey Federation. The May 4th, 2009 worldchampionship game against Canada was the third most watched televisionevent in Finland for all of that year. Finnish hockey fans keep close tabs onFinns playing overseas in other professional leagues such as in the NHL.Finland’s national football team has yet to qualify for a place in theWorld Cup or European Cup championship, and still the sport remainspopular, with a domestic professional league that includes fourteen clubs.Auto-racing, including both Formula One and Rally Car, is an internationalsport where Finnish athletes rank at the top, attracting a largeand enthusiastic following. The annual Rally Finland, held each summer inCentral Finland near Jyväskylä, attracts half a million spectators, making itthe largest organized public event in all the Nordic countries.CelebrityCelebrity, and the nature of fame, has evolved as media and media consumptionhave changed. Finland has embraced the global media market.The films, television shows, popular music, tabloid magazines, and evenbooks available in Finland today are part of a much broader cultural landscape.Celebrities in Finland are often the same people who are celebritieselsewhere—in England, the United States, or even in China. Reality televisionand the rise of YouTube, for better or worse, have rewritten many of therules of what is expected of a person in order to become famous. The linesbetween fame and infamy are blurring as the fascination and the desire forcelebrity status is increasingly high.This is a generation that sees the online space not as a separate placeyou go but as a continuation of their existence. The worrisome stuff…hasto do with a broader cultural framing that gets played out online—andonline in a magnified way. Because if you think of a lot of the internet—itscales everything….A certain kind of celebrity culture has been perpetuatedthrough the online space because you think you have access. Andthe fact is, it’s not a question of “Fifteen minutes of fame” online, it’s aquestion of being “ famous amongst fifteen.”Danah Boyd, “Internet Famous” from Digital Nation (Frontline, PBS)184