The size of the Annenberg class “Sports, Communication and Culture” doubled on Tuesday as extra attendees filed in to hear guest speaker Emilio Fernández Peña at the event “Social media, traditional media in the 2024 and 2028 Olympics.” 

Fernández Peña, director of the Olympics Studies Center at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and a professor of communications, spoke on the role social media plays in today’s information landscape and its implications for the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. 

Communications professor Daniel Durbin, who also serves as the director of the USC Annenberg Institute of Sports, Media and Society, said today the International Olympic Committee is trying to recreate the community of sports fans before the age of social media. 

“Roone Arledge in the 1970s reframed Olympics broadcasts with a segment they called ‘Up [Too] Close and Personal,’ which was the personal stories of athletes, introduced athletes and nine-minute-long form stories of their lives as part of the look of coverage,” Durbin said.

In the context of the 2028 Olympic Games, Fernández Peña said the method the IOC is using to communicate with its audience is “cross-pollination,” where a sports organization has several social media accounts and digital outlets.

Cross-pollination, a tactic used by several sporting organizations, has proven to be a successful social media strategy, creating a highly networked, interconnected online community, Fernández Peña said. 

Emily Vargas, a senior majoring in communication, said she gained valuable insights into cross-pollination, a strategy she found fascinating.

“[Cross-polination] is something that I think is reiterated a lot in content creation, but not something I’ve thought of in the lens of the sports organization,” Vargas said. “Learning the strategy was very valuable.”

The first modern Olympic Games took place in 1896 in Athens, Greece. The journalists who delivered the news of those Games operated in a very different media landscape, Fernández Peña said. 

Today, Fernández Peña said the role of information “gatekeeper” now belongs to algorithms, which impacts the way information is selected and transmitted.  

“Social media [is] controlled by what we call algorithms, which are mathematical formulas, which control [what] is released, which control [what] is published,” Fernández Peña said. “The problem right now with algorithms, with mathematical formulas, [is] that they are working, and the idea that humans are predictable.” 

The problem with the algorithm’s ability to predict human behavior, Fernández Peña said, is that it opens the door for individuals to be manipulated, posing a tricky problem for democratic societies. 

Another issue with social media Fernández Peña highlighted was that, where traditional media broadcast information to a mass audience who only receive information, social media creates a system in which the audience shifts between receiving and creating formation, Fernández Peña said. 

“In social media, everything [and] everybody [is] interconnected. So you have the capacity to influence others, and you have the capacity to be influenced by others,” Fernández Peña said. 

Fernández Peña said it has become harder to get people’s attention online due to the oversaturation of user-generated media. The world now operates in an attention economy, where successful content is content that is able to both capture and hold the attention of audiences. 

“The attention of young generations is not the same,” Fernández Peña said. “The attention to advertising and to TV programs … [is not] like the people of my generation at all.” 

Vargas said Durbin’s class has highlighted narrative analysis of the Olympic Games as a subject of study over the past year. She said that the curriculum at Annenberg has kept up with contemporary trends. 

“USC really has its finger on the pulse, I feel like it has very adequately equipped me for my job,” Vargas said. “I feel like here it’s the ability to understand the strategy and the reason you’re doing the work.”