The “Fall” of What? FIFA’s Public Viewing Areas and Their Contribution to the Quality of Public Life

Abstract

Much conventional scholarship considers “the public” to be in decline in the modern Western world, following a range of cultural developments believed to encourage withdrawal into the private domain. Public Viewing Areas devoted to communicating live events may be interpreted as countering such a trend by attracting audiences to the public sphere. This article examines how the world governing body of association football, FIFA, recently aimed to achieve such an objective by broadcasting the 2010 World Cup at six designated international Fan Fest sites. Drawing on theories of “spectacle” and sociality, the implications of FIFA’s initiative are interrogated by examining whether the environment and surveillance measures characterizing the “global spectacle” facilitated social interaction. In the process, established understandings of the “fall” and “quality” of public life are canvassed to propose how these collective fora might engender “meaningful” public communication beyond crowd assimilation through spatial co-presence and shared mediated imagery alone.