UNCTV Hackathon

8/18/2019 UNCTV Hackathon

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@mikerugnetta

Monday, April 18, 16

[Unscripted: Everyone hello! Thanks to Tom and everyone form UNC-TV for having me; it’s been really great to meet everyoneand here about what all in going on here in North Carolina and to see what you all are working on in the public media sphere.Visiting NC as a political statement at this moment. Thanks for sharing your experiences surrounding HB2 with me. Talking w/communities who are effected by it has been really enlightening and important for me.]

My name is Mike Rugnetta. I am the writer and host of the YouTube show


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Idea Channel which is produced by PBS Digital Studios and made by Kornhaber Brown in Queens, New York. On Idea Channel Iapply philosophical and critical concepts to pop culture – so talking about how


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Downton Abbey can show us that the past and history are two different things, talking about how


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emoji constitute a kind of communication that’s somewhere between speaking and writing, and talking about how though, aftera


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superhero or disaster movie, we may leave the theater and jokingly ask “MAN WHO IS GONNA PAY FOR ALL THAT DESTRUCTION?”we often don’t ask that question about real disasters in real life, and so maybe those movies give us an opportunity to do exactlythat.

I’m also the creator of a podcast called


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Reasonably Sound, about the science culture and theory behind all things audio... which, up until recently, was distributed byAmerican Public Media. On that I’ve talked about the history of


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Ice Cream truck jingles, the weird political implications of


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NOISE CANCELING HEADPHONES and talked how and why, and why it is perfect, that a minute of white noise accidentallyuploaded as a


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Taylor Swift track managed to hit #1 on iTunes for about a day in CANADA.

I bring all this up not as an extended advertisement for the work that I do – though if you want to go and check out


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@pbsideachannel

@reasonablysnd


idea channel or reasonably sound, that would be rad! – but rather to point out that I’ve talked about ALL these things under thebanner… of


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public media. Which for some people, for a lot of people, is unexpected.

Recently on twitter I made a


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joke to a game streamer–who, if you’re unfamiliar, is someone who plays games and streams their play so other people canwatch and see what happens and listen to their awesome commentary–and this streamer responded with “DID PBS… JUST TWEETAT ME… ABOUT MEMES?” This is how I responded. I think he was impressed? And that happens a lot!

Of course, we do get some people writing comments on videos saying things like


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“Well, now that PBS is talking about it, this is definitely over” and maybe they’re right … PBS is a broadcast organization and thereis some core aspect to certain niche cultures that turns to stone as soon as any outside eyeball is laid upon it. In other words,there is such a thing as bad publicity if a community’s natural state is solitude.

And we get your normal run of the mill naysayer who, both ignoring the SPONSORSHIP MESSAGES at the beginning and end ofIdea Channel episodes and not understanding how public media works, bemoan the use of their


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tax dollars on content where I talk about cartoons or internet ephemera.


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But for the most part - the bulk of our audience falls into two camps. 1) what is pbs?


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¯\_(ツ)_/¯


(we have a large international audience) and


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＼(＾▽＾)／


2) WHOA! This is like, a real PBS-PBS SHOW? That’s amazing! It’s so cool that PBS is doing this kind of thing.

The same is true for my podcast. When it was distributed by American Public Media’s


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Infinite Guest network, more often than not the response was “Whoa like, the same people who do Marketplace and stuff? Andthe cooking show that they made fun of on SNL with the Schweddy Balls sketch?”


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[schweddy balls video].

That’s a joke about


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http://wapo.st/1TTK67r


Splendid Table, btw. They’re delightful people. Their email newsletter is great. Highly recommended.

The point here is that people think they know Public Media because they know Splendid Table or ...

http://wapo.st/1TTK67rhttp://wapo.st/1TTK67r


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[bob ross video]

Bob Ross. What they don’t realize is that they don’t even know Bob Ross because they know Bob Ross - who was the Master andFirst Sergeant of an Airforce Base in Alaska. Who by his own admission was the mean guy, and who screamed so much in thearmed services, he vowed to never do it again if he left. And who hated his permed, dome of hair but did it... at first did it to savemoney on haircuts... but continued after his success because he knew his audience adored it. A happy accident, which Bobembraced, and taught the rest of us to embrace, in our creative endeavors as well.

I grew up watching Bob Ross with my grandmother, after school in the afternoons, and his tone–so, so very NOT screaming–hiscadence, subject matter, was for a very long time exactly the kind of thing that came to mind when conjuring anything PublicMedia not for children: Careful, slow talking for old people. Which, of course, is not the case. That is NOT what Public media is,or has to be. That is a misunderstanding. But unfortunately, I think much of Public Media, especially televised public media,bought into this misunderstanding. Public Media thinks it knows itself because it thinks People are correct in seeing The Joy ofPainting as representative of 100% of public media.

To put this another way: I went to a


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dinner function, a couple years ago, and at this function there were many PBS station managers who asked me if I gave money tomy local PBS station. I don’t. I told them why: Even in light of the successes of Sherlock and Downton, it doesn’t seem likestations understand how much good will there is for public media in my age group, and so they don’t reach out. It seems likethey don’t want us. Their response? From around the table, almost every station manager: we don’t want you. You’ll donateregularly when you have kids. And then again when you retire.

Meanwhile: the Bob Ross Foundation is using


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Twitch, a service made for those Game Streamers we were talking about, to stream their gameplay so people can watch… the BobRoss Foundation is using twitch to stream EVERY EPISODE of The Joy of Painting and people who would normally be watchingMINECRAFT OR LEAGUE OF LEGENDS OR DARK SOULS STREAMS are losing their mind over how awesome it is that they get towatch BOB ROSS. A community developed, inside jokes were rampant, people had meaningful experiences and, though I can’t saywith certainty, I can say with CONFIDENCE that 95% of those people were my age, or younger, and only had that experiencecontextualized as one related in any way to public media by their own previous experiences with Bob Ross, if they even had one.

On the other side of the internet: people watching Idea Channel,


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It’s Okay to Be Smart, Gross Science, Brain Craft, Space Time and other shows on the Digital Studios network are writingcomments like “WHOA. Never would have expected this from PBS. This is awesome.” And I agree. That it is awesome–not that it isunexpected though. Though they may look different from what you see on a TV, at the heart of all these shows is something very,very PUBLIC MEDIA, very very PBS.

To give you a break from listening to me yammer on about this... I asked Joe from It’s Okay to be Smart to talk for a minute aboutwhy he feels his work belongs in the public media sphere...


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[joe video]


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After he sent me that video, Joe and I were talking and he joked that his blood is “17% PBS KOOL AID” – We are, and I am, and thiswill probably come as no surprise, huge believers in public media. There are things that public media can do which no othermedia organization can by virtue of Public Media’s existing outside the Zone of Shenanigans that the rest of the media andentertainment world exists in: beholden to advertising, shareholders, ratings. Public media’s comparative independence hasgreat utility now, more than ever, as the meaning of the word


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“BROADCAST”


“broadcast” has changed. Where it used to mean the display of one stream of media from a central location to many, discreetmembers of an audience... now broadcast means, simply, “to share”. It means “to put into the world.” As the number of peoplewho are able to “broadcast” has greatly expanded, so too has the words semantic function. Broadcast is no longer one to many,it’s many to many.

Not the least of the reasons this is exciting is that we are in a position to fairly question the basis of what we’ve always taken forgranted as “broadcast”. In light of the last two decades of communication technology advances, what are the reasons anyone

would continue to treat broadcast like the


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cannon-like-megaphone of one-sidedness it has historically been? I can’t think of one good one; I can think of more than a fewterrible ones.

Those terrible reasons are rooted in laziness or the economic, corporate or hierarchical nature of commercial broadcast media.Which is, almost definitionally hegemonic: a system of control which feels “right” or “preferable” or even “just how it has to be” tothe people and institutions who are controlled by it.

Public media is especially, and uniquely, positioned to upset that structure... to ask, and answer, the question: What does the“Broadcast” in “Broadcast Organization” mean now? Given its dedication to community and local stories, ability to take risks andrespond to it’s audience directly ... I very, very strongly believe Public Media is situated to light one, if not several, pathwaystowards the future of broadcast media for PEOPLE. Not Advertisers. Not corporations. Not even “viewers” or “users” or “audience”but PEOPLE.


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[AND HERE I JUST WANT TO GO INTO A SHORT, UNSCRIPTED ASIDE ABOUT HB2]

- laws which tell people they are NOT “the public”- that as soon as they leave their private lives, they are not welcome- thats not how “publics” work; you don’t get to choose who is in your public; you get to choose how to nurture and support thepublic you have... or as is the case with HB2 ... not.- ‘all media works us over completely’ - mcluhan

“They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequencesthat they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered.”

- media does work and works on us- if you work in media, you work in the business of working on people- of normalizing things, or resisting the normalization of things- of showing what can, and should, be worthy of empathy and compassion by choosing, or not choosing, what stories to tell- and in public media, this is doubly true, given its proximity to its public and its ability to tell WHATEVER stories need telling.


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There is an opportunity, and I would argue, a responsibility, to use public media’s particular arrangement of assets to change themedia landscape for the better, for everybody. Not just your local market, but everywhere. If you work in media, there are nomore local markets. There is only one market, and its global, if not Universal. I also watched a lot of Carl Sagan as a kid.

So... in addition to asking what BROADCAST is in 2016, maybe this is an opportunity to also ask what


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“Public” “Media”


PUBLIC MEDIA is. Our public has never been bigger, more international, and has never been easier to reach. It has never beenmore hungry for interesting stories and personalities. Never more desirous of recognition and excited about experimentation andrisk. Never more willing to become involved in the things it loves–to defend and support and hold them up–so long as werecognize or celebrate them for having done so.

The model now–pioneered by YouTube and kickstarter and patreon and pervasive social media and so much else–is to buildthings in plain view of the audience. To give them access.


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All Media Is Now Public


All media is now public, in some sense. Put only public media is for PEOPLE. Not audiences, not viewers, not users. The PUBLIC.Until recently, that fact has languished behind a common understanding of “broadcast”, which is changing... which haschanged... thanks in no small part to the very hard work of everyone here, in this room, over this weekend and, I’m sure, wellbeyond.


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@mikerugnetta@pbsideachannel@reasonablysnd


Thank you.

UNCTV Hackathon

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