Let’s go back in the history of the Olympic Games before the Internet to see how the communication evolved from birds to tweets. Dating back to centuries, it all began with pigeons. From 776 B.C. games until 384 A.D., Roman Emperor Theodosius I had put a ban on the Olympics so that he could impose Christianity as a state religion. During that time, pigeons were the main source used to spread news. There was then, centuries of Olympic radio silence. It was by 1896, when the pigeons finally were replaced by telegraphs as the messengers of information. This decision was taken by the newly formed International Olympic Committee. It was for the first time in history that the radio did Olympics broadcast in 1924. The year 1936 saw a live telecast for viewers in Berlin and Potsdam, Germany. By 1960, the Games were being broadcast on television worldwide; and then 36 years later, in 1996, Atlanta hosted the first ‘Internet Olympics’. And today, almost 16 years later, the world is now following the Olympics at the 24/7 Olympics Athletes Hub, with various applications for smartphones. These applications help viewers track everything from the progress of the Olympic torch to the location of toilets in the host city. It also shows the London Eye full with a rainbow of colors that correspond to Twitter’s sentiment about the Games. It is believed that by 2016, when the next Summer Olympics are held in Rio, the digital reach of the Games will have evolved even further and there will be more mobile devices on the planet than humans. In this age, we now have a different kind of bird, who has taken over pigeons as messengers of information. Even with all this advancement in technology and media, there is still one question that interests all viewers- who won?
