The readings for week 10 has taught me some very interesting things.

The most important thing – at least for me, is the fact that social media isn’t taking over. For the longest time, I always thought that public broadcasters were gradually becoming irrelevant. Here’s a short list as to why that isn’t the case:

“PSB’s understandably wanted to profit from the new opportunities offered by social media to promote user participation and encourage independent audiovisual creations, but the increasing commercialization of social network services such as Youtube, Facebook and Twitter threatened to compromise public value”

1. Social media compromise public value. Public value describes the value than an organization contributes to society. Because PSB’s goal is to serve the public who pay for them and ‘educate, inform and entertain’, it can easily conflict with the goal of the user-generated content.
2. Social media will never have the same affordances that PSB offers. These affordances are what makes PSB’s unique – reliability, accuracy, objectiveness – just to name a few.
3. If anything, social media has made PSB’s more efficient and effective at delivering the news. Instead of having a T.V. show scheduled once a week for 2 hours or so, there is now the option to broadcast 24 hours shows (such as news24 by the ABC). There is also a constant news feed on the websites of these PSB’s.