Fall quarter came to a close this past week and now it’s time for my favorite part of each quarter – presenting my final project. One of the great things about the Master in Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) courses is that I seem to gain a new (or improved) set of tangible skills with each quarter. This time I threw myself into the world of multimedia storytelling with Advanced Multimedia Storytelling: People and Story taught by the incredible team from the Common Language Project (CLP).

Since school let out for the summer, I’ve kept busy at work and managed to volunteer myself for an intense but exciting science-related grant to contribute content with the very impressive QUEST program, a segment of KQED (public broadcasting) based out of San Francisco. QUEST’s multimedia content breaks down silos between interactive departments, TV production, radio, education and many more. Each staff member, no matter what their skill set or specialty, works together and tells a story in various forms, but all with a common focus and in a comprehensive effort. The work they produce is stellar. Take a look at the QUEST website for yourself.

I was thrilled to participate and dove right in by volunteering to contribute at least nine blog posts (some written by community partners) and one web extra to be posted on the QUEST website. I’m not going to say it was easy to write these first few posts and nail down my script for the audio slideshow I created.

Click here to view my final project site, PBS as America’s Largest Digital Classroom.

As a lifelong public television viewer and current employee at Seattle’s KCTS 9public television station, I’ve often heard the Public Broadcasting System’s (PBS) popular tagline, “Viewers Like You” to demonstrate its gratitude to viewers who support or directly contribute to the production of programming. However, as the traditional top-down dissemination model of public television is replaced with an open, many-to-many networked media model, this tagline could change to “Participants Like You” to more accurately reflect today’s public media. 

This paper focuses on the strong relationship between public television and education—a relationship fueled by technology. I invite you to read my research on the past, present and future of PBS as America’s largest digital classroom.

I gave this presentation as part of my final project for my Masters in Communication in Digital Media (MCDM) class at the University of Washington. Here’s a transcript (essentially) with what I said during my presentation.

Slide 1: Intro

The top-down traditional dissemination model of public television is being replaced with an open, many-to-many networked media environment. In today’s world, the famous PBS tagline of “Viewers like you” is no longer as applicable as it used to be thanks to this transition. Now, something along the lines of “Participants like you” may be a better fit. Technology shares a strong relationship with public television—a relationship initially sparked by education.

In this presentation, I’ll focus on PBS and its nearly 360 member stations that make up America’s largest classroom. From its beginning as educational television to today’s public media, PBS has remained committed to using media for the public good and has remained in classrooms across the United States.

Credit: PBS

Reading Ben Bagdikian’s Afterword from the book The Media Monopoly made me both proud to work for a public television station and extremely nervous at the same time. This article was written in 1997 and paints a pretty bleak picture for future funding and support of public broadcasting in the United States—some of which is taking place right now.

The introduction of television to the average American household in the 1950s featured almost entirely family-oriented, nonviolent programming. This type of content and the introduction of “free” home entertainment made the television becoming a permanent fixture in households. Then, the introduction of the remote control made it easier for viewers to switch between channels and resulted in broadcasters introducing racier, more entertaining content in an effort to keep the viewer on their channel. The demands for entertainment haven’t stopped and morphed into today’s commercial chaos and shallow television programming.

Changes in technology, criticism, funding threats and competition continue to impact public television today as they have in the past. In it’s struggle to define purpose, public television is also attempting to keep up with technological advances and appeal to the communication and accessibility demands of the new media demographic.

Winston’s theory of Supervening Social Necessity will help me explain the complimentary social forces that have led to the adoption of each phase as public television integrates and faces technological innovations. I’ll look the Uses and Gratifications theory as Winston presents it and figure out what it is about these new innovations and what makes society want to use them and adopt one over another.

Chapter six of The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom features Benkler’s analysis of mass media’s emergence in the United States and revolves around a few themes no matter the medium: the increase in costs, concentrated control of the one-way messaging, and the advertising-supported business model.

After presenting the study Motivators for the Intention to use Mobile TV: A Comparison of South Korean males and females to three small groups in class this past Tuesday night, I found myself understanding the study better and drawing conclusions I hadn’t thought of prior to class. I experienced a range of emotions between the rush of adrenaline from presenting, the intellectual stimulation from the mix of feedback and ideas from my classmates and the relief that I finished a big component of my course grade early in the quarter.

Throughout his 2004 book, We the Media, Dan Gillmor argues that the growth of Internet and related technologies is changing the balance of power between journalists and readers. He explains that this important shift requires a change in behavior for journalists to survive. The once passive “audience” now has not only the ability to create their own media and consume a much more broad assortment of media in return.

Just how much does gender affect attitude and intention to use new media? The digitally advanced nation of South Korea became the first market with mobile TV commercially available in 2005. Nearly one in seven residents regularly watched mobile TV programming just two years after the launch of Korea’s digital multimedia broadcasting (DMB) network. The DMB consists of both terrestrial (free) and satellite versions ($14/month) allowing users to watch TV through their mobile phone, car navigation systems, portable media players and more.