Between television, web and social media: On social TV, About:Kate and participatory production in German public television.

Stollfuß, S. (2018). Between television, web and social media: On social TV, About:Kate and participatory production in German public television. Participations: Journal for Audience and Reception Studies, 15(19), 36–59.

This article investigates how social media and participatory culture affect public television inGermany. Against the backdrop of what José van Dijck and Thomas Poell (2015) haveconceptualized as the ‘conflation of social media logic and television’s mass media logic’, Iwill present an additional perspective by emphasizing dynamics in a cross-media productionprocess. As a consequence of the dynamics that Henry Jenkins described in ConvergenceCulture, public television and social media have sought new ways to interweave. As I analyzethe German-French television series About:Kate (ARTE, 2013) with regard to the relationshipof producer-generated content (PGC) and user-generated content (UGC), I will identify aparticular mode of production practices which I will call ‘participatory production’. It is atthe core of participatory production practices that the merging field of television, digital andsocial media at the levels of ‘institutional strategies’, ‘professional production’, and‘content’ are affected in order to deliberately provide opportunities for anticipatedaudience engagement at the level of ‘audience participation’. Furthermore, participatoryproduction practices in the case of About:Kate indicate a modification of what can betermed social TV or ‘Social TV 2.0’ (Schatz et al., 2008), respectively.