Hey Brits, stop messing up our Olympics coverage with your social media!

Hey there, sports fans, you enjoying your cozy seats at the 2012 London Olympics?  Yea?  Are you loving your ability to be there watching history as it plays out live?  Are you bathing in my jealousy as I sit back here in the States with no opportunity or budget to make it to London?  Are you live blogging and tweeting every step of the way?

Well chill out with it will ya?  Your tweets and text messages are adding to the HIGH volume of traffic messing with both data networks and television coverage.  Sorry, but “LoL, we only got silver! #fml #olympics2012” needs to go on the down-low for a while ‘chaps. 

What is this doing exactly? Here’s an example.  During Saturday’s men’s cycling road race, the broadcasters were unable to tell the viewers just how far a head the two leaders were from everyone else.  The data from the GPS satellite had high volume from all the interference.  The amusing and tragic part of this was all the tweets saying the information wasn’t working.  What a dangerous cycle we play in.

An International Olympic Committee spokesman made a statement about the situation, "Of course, if you want to send something, we are not going to say 'Don't, you can't do it', and we would certainly never prevent people.  It's just – if it's not an urgent, urgent one, please kind of take it easy."  So basically he’s saying try not to text or tweet… but we can’t do anything to stop you from doing so.

Be considerate, only the WORLD is watching.

[Reuters]

Historian, teacher, writer, gamer, cheat master, and tech guru: follow on Twitter @AndrewC_GZ