Public Media 2.0

Citation
American University Center for Social Media, Public Media 2.0

Overview
This report identified five critical ways &mdash; choice, conversation, curation, creation, and collaboration &mdash; in which new tools and social practices are changing people’s media habits:

Choice. Rather than passively waiting for content to be delivered as in the broadcast days, users actively seek out and compare media on important issues through search engines, recommendations, videos on demand, interactive program guides, news feeds, and niche sites. . ..

Conversation. Comment and discussion boards have become common across a range of sites and platforms, with varying levels of civility. Users are leveraging conversation tools to share interests and mobilize around issues. Distributed conversations across online services. . . are managed via shared tags. Tools for ranking and banning comments give site hosts and audiences some leverage for controlling the tenor of exchanges. . ..

Curation. Users are aggregating, sharing, ranking, tagging, reposting, juxtaposing, and critiquing content on a variety of platforms from personal blogs to open video-sharing sites to social network profile pages. Reviews and media critiques are popular genres for online contributors, displacing or augmenting other genres, such as consumer reports and travel writing, and feeding a widespread culture of critical assessment.

Creation. Users are creating a range of multimedia content (audio, video, text, photos, animation, etc.) from scratch and remixing existing content for purposes of satire, commentary, or self-expression, breaking through the stalemate of mass media talking points. Professional media makers are now tapping user-generated content as raw material for their own productions, and media outlets are navigating various fair use issues as they wrestle with promoting and protecting their brands.

Collaboration. Users are adopting a variety of new roles along the chain of media creation and distribution—from providing targeted funds for production or investigation to posting widgets that showcase content on their own sites to organizing online and offline events related to media projects to mobilizing around related issues through online tools, such as petitions and letters to policymakers. “Crowdsourced” journalism projects now invite audience participation as investigators, tipsters, and editors. So far, it is a trial-and-error process.