BEIJING (AP) — The smartphones glowed. The irony reverberated.
As part of Sunday night’s closing ceremony for the most closed-off and secluded Olympics in human history, a carefully curated audience — well, dotted, really — packed the famed Bird’s Nest stadium into a warm and humanistic show.
The show itself, directed by the famous Chinese director Zhang Yimou, was quite bursting with color and music and energy and even joy. It felt disconnected from a COVID compartmentalized Winter Games that, despite its lingering theme of ‘Together for a shared future’, kept people by the thousands apart – both those inside and outside the calibrated bubble.
As the closing ceremony reached its climax, something interesting unfolded. It was the kind of moment that has become common in the post-lighter-at-the-concert era:
Prior to the ceremony, the official crowdpreppers had urged attendees to pull out their phones at some point. “When the Olympic flame is almost out,” said the emcee, “hold up your phone, turn it on and wave to the music.”
And they did, these carefully screened representatives of a carefully screened Games, these people who had gone through security screenings and wiped their mucous membranes and all kinds of other gates and portals and checkpoints to gather here for the event that is supposed to be the symbol of the planet come together in the spirit of excellence and friendly competition.
In The Era of The Phone, humanity negotiates a new relationship with itself. But when we grab hold of our remarkable and terrible devices, whether it’s swinging in unison in an Olympic Stadium or sitting alone and reaching across the airwaves, are we together but always apart? Or separately but always together?
The smartphone, barely a teenager in 2022, has – like many teenagers – sucked up the most oxygen in the room. And as these Bird’s Nest Olympians held their phones to the sky to become totems of warmth and togetherness against cold and COVID, a Chinese song called “You and Me” was played and the words “One World” were displayed in fireworks, it was easy to ask ourselves: is this the best connection we can hope for?
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Ted Anthony, AP’s director of new storytelling and news editing innovation, is the former director of Asia-Pacific news and former China news editor, reporting on his seventh Olympics. Follow him on Twitter at http://twitter.com/anthonyted
