In todays workshop we talked about the reading “Dijck J. and Poell T, 2014, Television & New Media, Making Public Television Social? Public Service Broadcasting and the Challenges of Social Media, Vol. 16, pp 148-164”. The class highlighted how television broadcasting are using social media to capture more viewers eyes and to increase their involvement with discussions and current news phenomenon’s.

TV Networks are using tweets, likes, and favourites to become a sound bite and attaching this “social” adjective to television in order to evoke conversational and creative strengths of networked platforms with the mass media entertainment and its influential figures. For example, using this ability to tweet questions to Waleed Ali on The Project allows for people at home with questions easy access through this media entertainment to their favourite influential individuals. However, it isn’t that easy. As we said in class, these networks filter through all the questions and find the ones that are most appropriate and don’t hit any markers or points that could be biased or enter into a discussion that isn’t relevant. So as we see, networks censor what they like and this is where it said that the “social involvement” isn’t really 100% truthful.

As said in the reading, in 2011 the BBC launched Up for Hire, a television format that explicitly incorporated social media elements. Up for Hire was a live event addressing one of the biggest social issues tormenting the U.K. economy: youth unemployment. Do you really think that they let every question through? Unlikely. This is like a Q&A tv show we talked about in class where it was purely a interactive live audience with panel speakers that said that we will be opening the floor to anyone who wants to ask questions to our speakers. But the audience don’t know that the broadcasters are monitoring, curating and filtering the live questions into order to importance. A little trick PBS has up their sleeve that some members of the audience aren’t aware of. Imagine the day there is no filtration…