Canned Reactions and FIFA Noise: The Specter of the Audience During a Pandemic

Synthetic crowd noise has been used in a variety of professional sports presentations since the onset of the pandemic. Sex dolls were used as seat-fillers during a professional soccer match in Korea in May of 2020. Technical compensations for the removal of crowds from stadiums indicate a dependency on the consistency of our media presentations. They also indicate a dependency on the kind of reproducibility that broadcast and presentation technology affords. This paper investigates—along McLuhanite and Baudrillardian lines—the significance of this inclusion of synthetic representations of an audience in order to legitimize the significance of these presentations and to pacify anticipated anxieties experienced by the television audience.