Emili Prado
Universitat Autónoma de Barcelona
THE CHALLENGES OF THE NET FOR CREATING A NEW "PUBLIC SPACE" AT THE LOCAL, NATIONAL AND EUROPEAN LEVEL
The confluence of two revolutions now underway, that of the Internet and that of digitalization, has led to numerous challenges for the media and particularly for television. The problems of audience fragmentation, user-generated content, new modalities of access to content, de-location and de-synchronization of consumption, the lack of industrially produced original content, and the new forms of distribution all affect the entire television industry, but even more specifically the public service. In the current situation it faces certain specific challenges in order to meet its traditional objectives, especially those related to the public space that affect its ability to be an effective tool in generating consensus, in stimulating social cohesion, in the production of identity, and in encouraging the participation of citizens in social and political processes.
When faced with these difficulties two attitudes develop. The first of these annuls television as a means of comunication and therefore also cancels its effectiveness in continuing to fulfil its functions. The second attitude, generat ed by the fascination with the advent of Inter net, moves toward forms of communication via the web , its audio-visual manifestations and especially the social networks. It is to be hoped that this stat e of affairs will facilitate the realization of those social and democratic functions that were previously solely in the hands of public broadcasting. Both of these attitudes are damaging to the legitimacy and the survival of the very concept of the public service. The first because if television does not survive as a medium, insist ing on maintaining the public television service would be an anachronism. The second because if the net belongs to everyone and citizens have power over these tools of communication they will then become the lords and masters of the dynamics of production of content, leading to an overabundance of mediators, especially public mediators.
The adherents of the first theory stubbornly hold to it, despite being clearly contradicted by the statistics. In fact television as a means of communication is still present in significant doses within media consumption worldwide, and the amount of time spent by citizens in watching TV is still steadily growing. To this should be added the use of the new forms of television and television consumed through formats and windows other than the television screen, and one should also consider the fact that the measurement of audience figures falls short of the reality, while the experts persist in ignoring the problem . Those who uphold the second idea choose to ignore at least two factors :
1 - audiovisual communication via the net requires a broadband connection, and the greater the increase in the sophistication of content and the technical quality of the image, the greater the bandwidth that is required for broadcasting it. These practices thus become further from the concept of a public or universal service.
2 - The phenomena of empowerment cannot substitute audiovisual consumption of an industrial origin , although they partly co-exist with them. On the other hand, apart from moments of social explosion that generate spontaneous dynamics of high participatory and democratic content, all the popular movements of communication that have developed by means of electronic technologies throughout history have shown that their sustainability is closely linked to the existence of driving forces that enable the creation of a sustainable social discourse.
In short, the public service is not de-legitimised or discredited by the arguments deriving from either of these two attitudes, and indeed its existence is more than ever justified by the inherent weaknesses of these arguments. Nevertheless the public service should redefine not only its goals and objectives but also the form of their realization with in the new state of affairs. A detailed analysis of the new media ecosystem will provide the solutions to this. One of these solutions concerns content, since the audiovisual industry has not been able to deliver original content to sufficiently supply the new channels and the limits of user-generated content are starting to appear ever more clearly. The public service will find its justification and its raison d'être in the generation of contents and in making them available for all media platforms and windows, creating synergies that not only multiply popular creative energy, but also the resources linked to the different areas of aggregation, at the local, national and European levels.
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