Spoiler alert: Social media is killing Olympic suspense

Would you rather have that electric moment of watching an Olympic event unfold live? Or would you rather find out about a medal win through a push notification on your cellphone? During this year's PyeongChang Games, maintaining the element of surprise is proving difficult.

Embrace getting it when we're making available. You can control it, but you're not going to be able to hide from it.- David Masse, Senior Editor of CBC Sports

As Wired senior editor Alexis Sobel-Fitts tells Day 6 host Brent Bambury, not having the event's outcome spoiled by a news alert or tweet comes at a cost: it would require a social media blackout.

The evolution of Olympic coverage

The first modern games kicked off in 1896, along with society's hunger to know when and where their national athletes were competing. Back then, the only way to find out was to read it hot off the printing press.

Roughly 20 years later, radio technology finally allowed for public broadcasts on a wider-than-local scale. This made the 1924 Summer Olympics in Paris the first ever to light up the airwaves.

By the time the 1960 Summer Games hit Rome, television sets across approximately 21 countries were able to pick up the coverage.

When the '90s came along, so did the World Wide Web and its dissemination of Olympic news.

Spoilers, however, didn't pose a threat until more than a decade later. As Sobel-Fitts explains, it all began when Twitter and Facebook took off.

"The 2012 Olympic Games in London was the first Olympics where we really saw spoilers and push notifications, and social media showing the outcome of the games to viewers before they were able to watch that on television. And that's why 2012 it is commonly thought of as the first 'social' Olympics."

Win some, lose some

The freedom and convenience of having the internet at our fingertips comes with its drawbacks.

"That feeling of surprise is great, but it's also a cost of the 24-hour information outlet that comes along with the internet," Sobel-Fitts laments. "I think it's one of the things that we give up in order to remain connected to the news."

Social media and smartphones can't bear full responsibility, though.

"Push notifications and Olympic spoilers, if anything, are getting worse every year as the media becomes more and more tied to reporting news as it happens, and pushing things out as quickly as possible," says Sobel-Fitts.

"A few days ago, during the men's snowboarding finals, a young snowboarder named Red Gerard won a surprise gold medal in the slopestyle competition and it was a really exciting event," explains Sobel-Fitts. 

"NBC actually interrupted their own broadcast in order to present the news that Red Gerard had won the gold medal, even though they hadn't aired their own broadcast yet of the event," she says.

But do real-time updates spoil the fun?

Embrace it

The Senior Director of CBC Sports, David Masse, says perhaps it's not all bad.

"This is a joint, shared experience. I don't know that you want to cheer by yourself in your man cave or your mountaintop."

There is something to be said for learning big news at the same time as the rest of the world. Perhaps a sense of collective excitement or connectivity. Global time differences complicate this, however. 

Enter push notifications.

"Embrace getting it when we're making available. You can control it, but you're not going to be able to hide from it," Masse says.

To hear our take on Olympic spoilers, download our podcast or click 'Listen' above.