José van Dijck and Thomas Poell’s paper, Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and the Challenges of Social Media (2015), holds significant pertinence for me as it is a central theme to one of our team’s P4 mission statements. Aside from the many notions that have been discussed in our group’s correspondence about our assigned topic, mediums, Marshall MsLuhan’s The Media is the Message being among many, José van Dijck and Thomas Poell’s discussion on evolving platforms in media bares semblance to one of our own themes of adapting to media change.
Alterations in societal thinking, be them good or bad, must be acknowledged.
It is admirable how the BBC stepped back from an editorial logic to embrace the inexorable progression of contemporary society to make public the thoughts of those fervent enough to contribute through Twitter and the likes but, was this social model masked with company propriety? According to José van Dijck and Thomas Poell, the filtering of realtime tweets and comments in programs like the BBC’s Up For Hire, may have been biassed, tipping the scale toward the beliefs of the production company officials and ostensibly the ‘button pressers’ in the control room. Such imbalances were investigated, ironed out through policy and placed into a new mantra. But if the BBC had rejected this, they would have undoubtably lost an integral social voice and gained a new place in broadcast purgatory.
For our team, and again I really want to get a name like Team Antimatter or something like that, we seemed to gravitate to this notion of adapting to change.