SYDNEY TOWER NOW SYDNEY TOWER EYE

The Sydney Tower at Pitt Street has re-opened after a $3.5 million renovation as SydneyTower Eye. The attraction boasts of a new state-of-the-art 4D-cinema and a refurbished Observation Deck upgraded with interactive multi-lingual touchscreens and high-powered binoculars.

Tower operator Merlin Entertainments Group says it is happy to bring the ‘Eye’ brand to Sydney, but some Australians have been up in arms, saying the new identity has given Sydney tourism a bad name. 

The SydneyMorning Herald carried an opinion piece by Giles Hardie, who said the new name reeks of ‘shameless copycat branding’. He also slammed the new 4D-movie theatre, saying it is nothing more than a tourist trap.

I visited Sydney Tower Eye over the weekend and found the new 4D movie really lame. The occasional squirts of water mist and vibrating floor boards are at best amateurish in creating “4D-effects”, and definitely not worth the $25 entrance fee.

More than 13,000 readers responded to an opinion poll that came with the SMH article. 32% of them agreed with the statement that the new name was “Bad- A towering mistake”, while 56% of them said it was “iSnack 2.0”. The article also attracted more than 130 comments from readers, most of whom condemned the operator for destroying the name of a significant Sydney landmark.

The overwhelming response to the opinion poll and the article bear testimony to the new culture in the digital age where people want to be heard instead of being passive consumers of news. As Mark Deuze pointed out in his article - Participation, Remediation, Bricolage: Considering Principal Components of a Digital Culture - news has evolved into a “collaborative and participatory activity” in the digital age.

The SMH website embraces this by allowing readers to express their views through various channels. It also allows readers to follow reporters via Twitter, giving them the option of automating their news source and personalizing it by specifying the reporter they would like to follow. These are key dimensions of News 2.0 that were identified by Graham Meikle in the book ‘Interpreting News’.