In Defense of NBC: There Are Two Olympics

Attendees at London's Olympic events were asked to avoid sending non-urgent text messages and tweets during those events -- because the resulting overload to data networks was compromising the television coverage of those events. That seems like an apt metaphor for an Olympics that is pitting not just athlete against athlete, but also screen against screen. There are, actually, two versions of the Games this year.

There are the events as we see them on TV, highly produced and heavily narrative and ad-filled and time-delayed; and then there are the events as they play out online, through live blogs and live tweets and athletes' Instagrams and full, nearly real-time recaps. These two versions of the Olympics are the same thing only in the sense that, say, quiche and custard are the same: They take the same basic ingredient and, through cooking them differently, create two completely separate products. It's hard not to read some future-of-television lessons into those Two Olympics.