The Meeting of Two Cultures: Public Broadcasting on the Threshold of the Digital Age

Provides a summary of discussions held in November 2007 on "Public Broadcasting: The Digital Challenge" among representatives of foundations, public broadcasting corporations and academia. Includes essays on visions for the future of public media

Dynamics of a Periphery TV Industry: Birth and Evolution of Korean Reality Show Formats

Television format, a tradable program package, has allowed Korean television the new opportunity to be recognized globally. The booming transnational production of Korean reality formats have transformed the production culture, aesthetics and structure of the local television. This study, using a historical and practical approach to the evolution of the Korean reality formats, examines the dynamic relations between producer, industry and text in the context of cultural globalization and suggests a new perspective of television studies challenging the center-periphery model

The politics of new technology

A recent article explains how one of the most militant workforces in the country, car workers at British Leyland's Longbridge plant, came to have its spirit of resistance broken. There are several reasons: the failure to mobilise members in response to the sacking of the union convenor late in 1979, the aggressive management tactics of Michael Edwardes, mass unemployment, the combativity of the Thatcher government. However, what the authors of this New Society piece single out as 'the real turning point' was the introduction of new technology which forced on the unions 'flexibility' by deskilling jobs, massively increasing output, and introducing an electronic information network called Machine Monitoring System that resulted in much greater surveillance of individual employees

Dynamics of a Periphery TV Industry: Birth and Evolution of Korean Reality Show Formats

Television format, a tradable program package, has allowed Korean television the new opportunity to be recognized globally. The booming transnational production of Korean reality formats have transformed the production culture, aesthetics and structure of the local television. This study, using a historical and practical approach to the evolution of the Korean reality formats, examines the dynamic relations between producer, industry and text in the context of cultural globalization and suggests a new perspective of television studies challenging the center-periphery model

Dysregulating the Media: Digital Redlining, Privacy Erosion, and the Unintentional Deregulation of American Media

Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Apple have been joined by Disney+, Twitch, Facebook, and others to supplant the broadcast industry. As the FCC, FTC, and other regulators struggle, a new digital divide has emerged. The current regulatory regime for television is built upon the government’s right to manage over-the-air broadcasting. As content producers shift away from broadcast and cable, much of the government’s regulatory control will end, resulting in new consequences for public policy and new challenges involving privacy, advertising, and antitrust law. Despite the technological change, there are compelling government interests in a healthy media environment. This article explores the constitutionally valid approaches available to discourage discrimination and digital redlining and instead promote the public interest embodied in the Communications Act. Even as broadcast regulation fades away many of the goals should be pursued, including the promotion of diversity of viewpoint, access to news and educational content, and the fostering of cultural content for those without the financial resources to buy broadband access. In addition, the tracking technologies inherent in online media create a compelling need to protect from the heightened risks to personal privacy. The article calls upon the FTC to become the lead regulator, enforcing the Sherman Act, Clayton Act, and the FTC Act’s provisions to assure that competition, online advertising, customer privacy, and the public interest are rigorously enforced

Dysregulating the Media: Digital Redlining, Privacy Erosion, and the Unintentional Deregulation of American Media

Netflix, Amazon, YouTube, and Apple have been joined by Disney+, Twitch, Facebook, and others to supplant the broadcast industry. As the FCC, FTC, and other regulators struggle, a new digital divide has emerged. The current regulatory regime for television is built upon the government’s right to manage over-the-air broadcasting. As content producers shift away from broadcast and cable, much of the government’s regulatory control will end, resulting in new consequences for public policy and new challenges involving privacy, advertising, and antitrust law. Despite the technological change, there are compelling government interests in a healthy media environment. This article explores the constitutionally valid approaches available to discourage discrimination and digital redlining and instead promote the public interest embodied in the Communications Act. Even as broadcast regulation fades away many of the goals should be pursued, including the promotion of diversity of viewpoint, access to news and educational content, and the fostering of cultural content for those without the financial resources to buy broadband access. In addition, the tracking technologies inherent in online media create a compelling need to protect from the heightened risks to personal privacy. The article calls upon the FTC to become the lead regulator, enforcing the Sherman Act, Clayton Act, and the FTC Act’s provisions to assure that competition, online advertising, customer privacy, and the public interest are rigorously enforced

Selling The American People: Data, Technology, And The Calculated Transformation Of Advertising

This dissertation tells the history of a future imagined by advertisers as they interpreted and constructed the affordances of digital information technologies. It looks at how related efforts to predict and influence consumer habits and to package and sell audience attention helped orchestrate the marriage of behavioral science and big-data analytics that defines digital marketing today. My research shows how advertising and commercial media industries rebuilt their information infrastructures around electronic data processing, networked computing, and elaborate forms of quantitative analysis, beginning in the 1950s. Advertisers, agencies, and media companies accommodated their activities to increasingly calculated ways of thinking about consumers and audiences, and to more statistical and computational forms of judgement. Responding to existing priorities and challenges, and to perceived opportunities to move closer to underlying ambitions, a variety of actors envisioned the future of marketing and media through a set of possibilities that became central to the commercialization of digital communications. People involved in the television business today use the term “advanced advertising” to describe a set of abilities at the heart of internet and mobile marketing: programmability (automation), addressability (personalization), shoppability (interactive commerce), and accountability (measurement and analytics). In contrast to the perception that these are unique elements of a “new” digital media environment that emerged in the mid-1990s, I find that these themes appear conspicuously in designs for using and shaping information technologies over the course of the past six decades. I use these potential abilities as entry points for analyzing a broader shift in advertising and commercial media that began well before the popular arrival of the internet. Across the second half of the twentieth century, the advertising industry, a major cultural and economic institution, was reconstructed around the goal of expanding its abilities to account for and calculate more of social and personal life. This transformation sits at an intersection where the processing of data, the processing of commerce, and the processing of culture collide

Forward into the Past: Speech Intermediaries in Television and Internet Ages Symposium: Falsehoods, Fake News, and the First Amendment: Panel 3: The Brave New World of Free Speech

Communication constructs society. By speaking to, with, and among one another, people and groups build relationships that allow us all to live more fully, understand the world better, and govern ourselves collectively. As societies grow, expression and engagement become more challenging. The presence of more ideas, larger and more diverse potential audiences, and more powerful and remote institutions threatens to reduce communication to a futile exercise. Whatever normative goals different people and groups may want public discourse to serve, pursuing those goals gets harder

Interactive Food and Beverage Marketing: Targeting Children and Youth in the Digital Age

Looks at the practices of food and beverage industry marketers in reaching youth via digital videos, cell phones, interactive games and social networking sites. Recommends imposing governmental regulations on marketing to children and adolescents