The Impact of Social TV and Audience Participation on

National Cultural Policy: Co-creating television comedy

with #7DaysLater

Jonathon Hutchinson, University of Sydney@dhutchman

International Association of Media and Communication Researchers (IAMCR), Hyderabad 2014

“radical decentralization, radical trust,

participation instead of publishing, users as

contributors, rich user experience, the long tail,

the web as a platform, control over one’s own

data, remixing data, collective intelligence,

attitudes, better software by more users, play,

undetermined user behaviour”

(Fuchs, 2014: 32)

exploitation of free labour (Terranova, 2004),

blogging as a practice is cynical and narcissistic (Lovink, 2008)

Web 2.0 users are more passive users than active creators (van Dijck, 2009) social media

manipulates and constructs social

connections (van Dijck, 2013)

Social TV“the interactions among other viewers and between viewers, the characters, and the producers of the show enabled by the ‘second-screen’ practice”

(Giglietto and Selva, 2014: 260)

Social TV

“a metaphorical ‘watercooler’ in the cloud, but one where the watercooler

conversations take place instantly, rather than at work the following morning”

(Harrington et al. 2013: 405)

Image: ABC, CC BY NC

“the application of the principles of universality of availability, universality of appeal, provision for minorities, education of the public, distance from vested interests, quality programming standards, program maker independence, fostering of the public sphere”

PSB Reithian values:

(Cunningham, 2013: 62)

“it is better to understand the ABC and SBS as public service media organizations,

rather than public service broadcasters”

“The ABC and SBS have the potential to be content innovators in the provision of news and information in the ways that utilise UCC (user-created content) strategies”

Flew et al., 2008: 2

“Communications Minister Stephen Conroy has also announced the ABC and SBS charters will be updated to take into account their online and digital content.”

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-03-12/conroy-announces-media-reforms/4567550

#7DaysLater is a program

“…taking comedy to the

scary arena of interactive

storytelling where the

audience gets to write the

brief via social media for

each weekly episode that

will air just seven days

later on ABC2”

(ABC, 2013).

Challenges

Opportunities

The AudienceVisibility

Cut ThroughGrowing Digital

ExperimentThink Titles

Invest in up & coming talent

Richard HuddlestonSupervising Executive Producer, ABC TV

The Work Pipeline

1. @7DaysLaterTV

2. @Daley_Pearson

3. @HarrisonTheFan

4. @MWhalan

5. @henry_and_aaron

6. @bajopants

7. @ABC2

8. @WASHINGTONx

9. @JordanRasko

10. @tomandalex

1. #7DaysLater

2. #qanda

3. #ZandA

4. #spooky

5. #Animation

6. #FlightoftheConchords

7. #Western

8. #Hawaii

9. #ggtv

10. #zombie

“I eventually want to end up

writing and producing for film and

television and thought this would

be just a good experience to start

with. I mainly have a background

in writing and directing for theatre

and handling social media (as a

job), so this was the perfect

crossover.”

@HarrisonThe Fan

“PSB 2.0 becomes a media policy instrument (Syversten,

1999) based on a set of normative values that aims to

fulfil the democratic, social and cultural needs of the society by transferring

traditional PSB ethos online” (Brevini, 2013, p. 31). Four normative criteria:

citizenshipuniversality

qualitytrust

PSB 2.0

PSB 2.0

It is problematic, beyond the

economical perspective, to introduce

PSB 2.0 through these criteria for

reasons including liberal versus

social democracy or access and

retrievability via differing internet

protocols in different countries

Jonathon Hutchinsonjonathon.hutchinson@sydney.edu.au