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Prof. Dr Wolfgang Duchkowitsch, University of Vienna #52 What does science ask? In the face of media metamorphoses, different perspectives shape the interrelationship of public service broadcasting and digitisation. They manifest themselves in three types. The following consideration embarks on a round trip, divided into eight sections.

1
In September 2019, the Konrad Adenauer Foundation asked what significance public service broadcasting has for social communication in the age of digitalisation. Its expert, Daphne Wolter, rejoiced in view of inherent potential: with the new technical possibilities, public service broadcasting journalism could face a golden age for research, preparation and marketing.

Communication scientist Paul Clemens Murschetz was not at all optimistic in 2019 in the book "Die digitale Metamorphose und der Wandel der traditionellen Massenmedien aus Sicht der Medienökonomie": Public Service Broadcasting, an undisputed public good, would first have to find its way into the digital future.

Richard Meng, social scientist and journalist, did not spare clear words when he spoke about digitalisation and media metamorphosis. He asked in July 2020 how journalism is changing with the times and whether its quality can suffer ("Frankfurter Rundschau", 18 July 2020). His coordinates: Entire media business models are tottering, and the result is less journalism, recognisable, for example, in job cuts at the BBC. The upheaval is accelerating because advertising is disappearing. But that is not the core of the upheaval. It lies in digitisation, which is so superficially said everywhere to be (merely) pushed forward consistently. For Meng, public service broadcasting is not (yet) facing a gold rush due to digitisation.

2
Classic media behaviour is changing perpetually and unstoppably due to the stormy developments of digitisation. The loss of importance of linear television has been apparent for some time. The common viewing behaviour of tuning in to certain programmes at certain programme times is declining.

Today, communication scientist Roland Burkart could not think of a study like the one he conducted in the early 1980s.
Its aim was to find out, with the help of the method of participant observation, what meaning the news programme "Zeit im Bild" has for the family watching it.

It would be no less inconceivable that a crime series like "Das Halstuch", broadcast by ZDF and ORF, a family programme full of suspense, would once again become a "street sweeper". The exculpatory explanation, classic-simpel: Tempora mutantur.

3
In 1992, the communication scientist Irene Neverla drew attention in her study "Television Time" to the fact that programmes broadcast at certain times represent a social zeitgeber in people's daily routines. Her further statement that people use television as an escape from the organisational pressures of everyday life was equally true at the time. There was talk of a "campfire" because the whole family found itself in front of the screen, across generations.

In the meantime, the trend towards the niche has intensified. The more output devices are available in a household, the more likely it is that individual family members will also pursue their respective interests on Saturday evening instead of watching something together.

The changes are unmistakable. For most adolescents and young adults, TV hardly plays a role as a zeitgeber any more in view of the advancing digitalisation. Linear television will continue to enjoy the significance of a social zeitgeber primarily only for the 60+ generation.

4
According to Richard Meng, public service broadcasting still has a reasonably crisis-proof financing model, but it also needs a creative challenge. Otherwise it will adapt to the flat mass products of the private network platforms.

My slogan against the spectre of flat mass-produced goods is: The future does not happen, it is made. My reflections on this are based on discussions with students of the Master's programme "History of Vision and Media" at the University of Vienna. The starting point of these discussions was the question: What could the means of digitisation in public broadcasting be used for, if the creative potential of the ORF is specifically considered?

The following considerations are to be understood against a broadly stretched horizon, including potentially near as well as distant boundary lines:
Would it be conceivable to survey the use of individual broadcasting offers on ORF not only quantitatively in order to be able to market the audience ratings? Would it not be beneficial to document the value of ORF in the viewing community to develop a new instrument that makes use of the possibilities of digitalisation by authorising viewers to give reasons for their liking or disliking of broadcasting offers according to sophisticated specifications of qualitative characteristics within the respective categories?

Would it be conceivable to enrich the value of explosive news by offering links to background information, irrespective of the willingness and maturity of citizens to seek guidance on their own on the "net"?

Would it be conceivable to invite youths and young adults not only selectively to learn about their programme preferences and wishes, as happened in 2018, but within the framework of an Austria-wide panel study as an expression of public appreciation? Perhaps even with the option of being able to participate in the conception and production of their own youth programme as a companion to specialists - inspired by FUNK? - or in the development of long-term cooperations with universities and universities of applied sciences, for example with the Master's programme "Digital Media Management" at the FH St. Pölten?

Would it be conceivable for ORF to take on a special watchdog function, which would consist of commenting on crude views and conspiracy narratives on the net in its own broadcast format together with representatives of communication science, for example in order to highlight "infodemias"?

Would it be conceivable for the ORF to take the initiative to install media cooperations nationwide, provided that media and economic policy is prepared to provide funding in this regard?

Would it be conceivable for the ORF to develop and secure an understanding of its role in order to assist the pluralistic, individualistic and fragmented societies of late modernity when it comes to using the technical possibilities of digitalisation for crisis management strategies?

Would it be conceivable for the ORF to address digital time competence as a dimension of the "cultural technique of the digital" within the framework of its legally enshrined educational mandate, in order to promote enlightened and time-sovereign use of digital media?

5
Public service broadcasting is both affected by and involved in a caesura in the history of media "that is fundamentally changing the communication climate of society", as Edmund Pörksen writes in his book "Die große Gereiztheit" (2018). He condenses the irritability of our digital age into five crisis scenarios, understood as a "call for analysis and enlightenment - on the way to a media maturity and an autonomy of thought and action": truth crisis, discourse crisis, authority crisis, comfort crisis and reputation crisis.

Pörksen sees a possibility for overcoming such crises in the utopia of an "editorial society", since in principle everyone can become a broadcaster. In such a society, good journalism is imperative. It consists of seven commandments: Orientation towards truth, scepticism, orientation towards understanding and discourse, relevance and proportionality, criticism and control, ethical-moral consideration, transparency.

The fact that public service broadcasting inherently carries out these imperatives does not come naturally. They are its singular brand, without being able to dispose of all the technical means of digitisation in Germany as well as in this country due to legal requirements. This is visible in the "dwell time concept", which, to the dismay of many recipients, especially young people, prevents the unlimited consumption of regularly broadcast TV and radio programmes. After all, they have to go offline seven days after being broadcast, i.e. they have to be "de-published", as this ugly term is called. Whether this will change after the "Corona crisis" has been overcome remains to be seen, even if astute observers of current events expect socially effective new regulations soon.

6
The basic idea of an "editorial society in which everyone can also be a broadcaster for technical reasons" can already be found in Bertolt Brecht, taken up by Hans Magnus Enzensberger in "Baukasten zu einer Theorie der Medien", 1970 and adapted in 2000: The net has abolished the difference between sender and receiver. Enzensberger coined the term "zero medium" in his 1988 television criticism. According to him, all complaints about television have become pointless. Television itself had become a medium of irrelevance. It degenerated into a medium of irrelevance and arbitrariness, into a "trance medium".

In 2000, he indirectly moved away from this view. In his "Spiegel" essay, he affirmed: "Media play a central role in human existence, and their rapid development is leading to changes that no one can really assess."

7
Today, the internet permeates our lives significantly. Web TV or Internet TV have now become widely known as common terms. TV providers transmit streams via the internet, which also includes the ORF TVthek.

According to media psychologist Jo Groebel ("Das neue Fernsehen", 2014), strong changes are evident in TV consumption. He discovered the "rocking recipient". This person indulges in active or passive consumption depending on mood and situation (community or individual use). TV is experiencing a renaissance as a medium of community building in the form of online subgroups. Online platforms do not function as competition to television. Both complement each other and merge. He predicts that television will remain because it is "one of people's basic preferences".

But what are the "basic preferences of people"? The answer to Groebel's prognosis might be found in Enzensberger (2000) for people who are no strangers to polemics: "Media prophets who prophesy either the apocalypse or salvation from all evils for themselves and for us should be exposed to the ridicule they deserve".

8
On 30 September 2017, a panel discussion on the topic of digitalisation took place at the "Darwin's Circle" conference in Vienna. The question of whether digitisation is to be understood as a phenomenon of evolution or revolution became a pleasantly secondary issue due to different views in the history of communication. The general tenor was that solutions for dealing with digitalisation were rare. There were only prospects for life in the digital age. US journalist Jeff Jarvis put it in a nutshell. He had already made it crystal clear the day before at the ORF Dialogue Forum: We are only at the beginning of this discussion.

Against this background, it would be futile to point out that media in the pluralistic, individualised, fragmented society are no longer assigned the power to produce content, as they used to be during the rule of fascist structures, so that the population faithfully conforms to it.
It would be equally futile to point out that the media alone do not have the power to influence social sensitivities and constructs.

However, in an intellectual alliance with institutions of humanitarian thought and action, such as religious communities, the Red Cross, UNESCO, Greenpeace, Doctors Without Borders, Reporters Without Borders and the like, public broadcasting could programmatically nourish the confidence that an idea, preserved in the European world of thought since antiquity, promises meaning throughout life: to lead a happy life. This includes, at the very top, the right to one's own time.