Some years ago it would have demanded much more attention.

As a man who would like to think of himself as one who makes chess an important part of his life; on a whim I looked upon the world chess championship on wikipedia and realized that it was going on right now.

What does it say about the world society where such an important game becomes something forgotten?  

Or does it have more to do with the cannibalizing of the game by those who wish to put a brand name on it?

It is remarkably tight thus far.

If you are interested in the progress of the championship this series of youtube synapses are excellent if you can decipher the thick UK accent: 

But then I don't understand sports either.

The world champions used to be big names before. Fischer, Kasparov etc. 

I'm not a good player myself, but I surely admire those great champions.

In my part of the "real" world ping pong is still popular.  Bridge never really made it here, that can't be a missing cold war collateral damage.  Maybe online games not limited to Illy finished off the traditional strategy games.   /me recalls Civ as a board game...

My take on this is that games with a long learning period are on a gradual decline. This is a reflection of the times we live in - too many things that youngsters can do, so they look for instant gratification. Games like poker, which you can learn quite quickly and play well even without calculating the probabilities (the psychological component is often more important than the math component), are on the rise.

I believe that we can arrest this decline, by teaching such games or "mind sports" as they are promoted these days, to kids at a young enough age that they master the learning curve and realize how much fun those games are, before they get sucked into instant-gratification games like *shudder* first person shooters. But then, you need sponsorship, and to get sponsorship the game should look exciting, and watching an expert playing a brilliant move in chess or bridge doesn't look exciting or make any sense to someone who doesn't know the game. So it's kind of a vicious cycle with no easy solution.

Now anyone with a computer and an internet connection can play chess with anyone else. It is not rare to play chess with someone in another country. And you could be playing a chess master every time you launch microsoft chess. 

This doesn't make it less exciting, only more common. Which only shows most people got excited about the rarity of the event, not the actual game. 

people don't care about chess.  people don't read the Bible anymore.  heck, they don't read anything anymore. 

we grow dumber by the minute; we celebrate ignorance. see, e.g., paris hilton, kim kardashian.

if you want people to care about the world chess championship, you better get kate upton to dance around the board and figure a way to hold it on top of a smartphone (one of the most ironically named objects of all time).