Let the games begin: social media and creative citizenship during London’s Olympic #savethesurprise campaign

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes #savethesurprise, the hugely successful social media campaign launched prior to the London 2012 Olympic Games. In brief, #savethesurprise helped to persuade over 100,000 audience members not to divulge on social media any of what they saw during the two, live dress rehearsals of the Games’ opening ceremony; this ceremony then went on to become a part of the most watched television event in history. To explore how and why the campaign worked, this paper introduces the concept of ‘architectures of participation’ (AoP). AoP are socio-technical structures and practices that shape the ways in which people and organizations co-construct events and realities via communication. By applying this concept to the #savethesurprise campaign, this paper presents a participatory architecture undergirded by strong legal, technical and social layers. Furthermore, a sense of creative citizenship and fair play emerge as key audience motivators.

KEYWORDS:

• Creativity
• Twitter
• audience
• architecture of participation
• Olympic Games
• social media
• London 2012

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Note on contributor

Katerina Girginova is a Doctoral Candidate at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, where she works on media events, audiences and creativity studies.