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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   4258 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 9, 2026

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The Winter Olympics is happening right now. Is it just me, or do the Olympics feel like they are far less culturally relevant than they used to be?

Is it just me, or do the Olympics feel like they are far less culturally relevant than they used to be?

At least seems to be true in Korea:

https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/southkorea/society/20260209/why-south-koreans-are-tuning-out-2026-winter-olympics

The Milan Cortina Winter Olympic Games, which officially opened with preliminary events on Wednesday (local time) before the formal opening ceremony on Friday, have drawn the lowest level of Korean public interest ever recorded for a Winter Olympics. Google Trends data shows domestic searches for "Olympics" have fallen below 10 on a 100-point scale — down from 30 during the 2022 Beijing Games and a peak of 100 when Korea hosted the PyeongChang Games in 2018.

The disengagement is not uniquely Korean. U.S. broadcaster NBC's prime-time viewership for the Beijing Olympics averaged just 11.4 million — a 42 percent drop from PyeongChang. Ticket sales for Milan Cortina reached about 75 percent of capacity by early February, with nearly 1.2 million of roughly 1.5 million tickets sold, though organizers had relied on late surges and NHL star power to close the gap after a sluggish start that saw only 613,000 tickets sold through October.

"There was a time when families sat together in the living room to watch, even during hard economic times. That era is over," Yu said. "Everyone now consumes whatever content they want on their own smartphones."

Yu added that Koreans' emotional investment in national representation has weakened. "People are less inclined to feel that someone else's achievement on the international stage is somehow their own. Korea already has so much cultural content representing the nation globally that the Olympics no longer hold that singular status."

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