the latest development in the global living room

Click here to see the latest development in the global living room

One of the things I occasionally bang on about, following on from scholars such as David Morley, Paddy Scannell and Lynn Spigel, is the curious mobility of television’s domestic setting.  In Berlin, they have now turned a whole stadium into a living room for the World Cup.

There have already been studies on how stadiums are being adapted as home spaces, such as the setting up of a living room in Utrecht railway station (below) to watch the Beijing Olympics, but this is a whole new scale.

Utrecht centraal train station becomes the nation’s ‘living room’ during the 2008 Olympics.

Yet this is also not just a phenomenon that could happen anywhere – this still seems very Berlin to me….