The first reading assigned in week 10 was an extract from J. Van Dijck and T. Poell’s Television & New Media (2015), that focuses on the topic of making public television social.

Since Eurovision just passed, I thought that this would be the perfect opportunity to discuss this topic. It discusses how television has begun to incorporate different forms of social media into it, in order to be more involved with the audience, and keep them connected. So, I was sitting around with my friends last Friday night, with Eurovision up on the TV, and we were all keeping an eye out for some of the stupidest Tweets that showed up on the screen. I also noticed that every now and then, someone would take out their phone to check Facebook or something, and I saw how much of a genius move it was to incorporate all this social media. With all this new media and technology, people generally don’t have the ability to focus on one thing for such a prolonged period of time, and so to give their minds a break from focusing on the TV, they’ll take a quick browse through whatever social media they use, or even just stop watching completely. By connecting social media to television, the audience now has the option to still be involved with what’s going on in the program they’re watching, while still having that mental break. It’s kind of like when a primary school teacher makes a game out of schoolwork.