For this post, I’m exploring ideas presented in J. Van Dijck and T. Poell’s ‘Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and the Challenges of Social Media’, one of the course readings for the media institutions topic, which if you haven’t been around my blog is the very topic my final assessment is based upon.

Originally, when my group started putting together the video essay, we referred to the idea of Public Service Broadcasting heavily throughout the essay, but I pushed to only refer to this as social media for the reason that is though, yes, social media is public service broadcasting, the inverse is not true. In some circumstances, also, Social Media is not public service broadcasting. Me posting a photo of a cat, isn’t a service. Really. So we changed the wording. What we were originally talking about is this dynamic shift of power between big institutions and small individual humans with Facebook accounts, somehow able to draw a large amount of viewers. As many people watch PewDiePie as they do just about any Australian News Program and this is one of the ways in which the world has changed tremendously over the past few years.

In Van Dijck and Poell’s work, they explore the ways in which institutions have reacted to the rise of social media and the ways in which social media has responded to itself becoming a broadcasting platform. Though most people tend to think of Facebook and YouTube as platforms, they are as much media institutions as any non-web-based institution, so in that way, it is worth pointing out that YouTube and Facebook have ads, sponsored posts and many other revenue avenues including an enormous amount of data mining that occurs without you even knowing it. Check out my post here for more of my thoughts on that. Facebook, especially is a huge corporation, and funnily enough these online mega-conglomerates are just as incestuous as the offline institutions, Facebook owns Instagram, Google owns YouTube, in fact, between Facebook, Microsoft and Google, most people would find themselves on one of their sites all the time.

Similarly in the reading Van Dijck and Poell explore the way television has reacted to social media. Now the networks are trying to breed social media with their own content, Q&A is a great example, taking questions from both the in-show audience and the twitterverse as well as the live feed on the program. If anything will save conventional media broadcasting (which nothing will), it’s the way in which the two of them are colliding to become more involved and open.