ABSTRACT
Port Elisabeth, summer 2010. The town has become the site of a global party. The World Cup semifi nal being played in the Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium is broadcast by the media all over the planet, the sound of its vuvuzelas can be heard from the Southern to the Northern hemisphere and smother the planet in a cloud of buzz. The games have become ubiquitous, literally “tele-visual.” Their sounds and images circulate in a global information space, displayed in newspapers and on screens, communicated via the World Wide Web, using artifi cial satellites as extraterrestrial switches to bridge the latitudes and longitudes that divide the world into North and South, East and West, as if to overcome the planet’s spherical shape.
