Twitter and Facebook: a gross mismatch for R3?

[Lateralthinking1]

I don't understand Twitter but that last set of figures looks very dubious to me. As for Facebook, it always feels like the kind of town where you look for the tourist attractions and find that there aren't any. Really, for its size, there is absolutely nothing there. Even travelling around it is like a constant encounter with red traffic lights.

Unfortunately this is our world now. Bear in mind that every Government Department is signed up to these things. Ditto private companies. It is the only way apparently. How the two inventors must look at it all with bewilderment unless they know far more than we would ever be told.

On an earlier point, I thought Radio Times had been sold off by the BBC?

[handsomefortune]

How much paid time do R3 employees spend online tweeting?

as much paid time as they like presumably french frank, as the objective is to stimulate the concept of this specific mode of online communication. afterall, there's nothing for young people to express culturally, or creatively, their views aren't that important when it comes to the crunch. i assume the thinking is 'best let them mess about on social media as it keeps them busy between contributing to making programmes'.

the same desperation to twitter/fb has been experienced previously, by longterm r4 'woman's hour' listeners. provided the excuse for the demise of the beeb message boards. as you suggest, social media is cheap .... and limiting. evidently, twitterers themselves can't even be bothered with it, as they're not motivated to respond to content in any meaningful way...(ditto r4 'woman hour' tweets: 'julie of doncaster likes pie crust' is not a comment worthy of selection, is not essential to women now, or ever)!

social media isn't necessarily about engaging with programme content, or the beeb engaging with listeners... which is exactly why it is the chosen method of correspondence imo.

Couldn't they be spending that time improving the online content?

no! it's not about improving, it's about the very reverse unfortunately....you'd think they'd want to improve their online image ....? but they apparently don't. plus of course, tax payers money doesn't even enter into it, even though it's this threat that will be the end of the beeb as a worthwhile institution eventually.

I do get the impression that behind the scenes is an army of 30-somethings whose job is to bring R3, and its audience, kicking and screaming, into the world of 'young people'.

i don't think it's an 'army', it's just a handful of younger people, doing exactly as required, by the trust and by controllers. imv they are useful only as 'the face of change', 'sensationalist' though this may be in intention.

if you look at it from this perspective, the younger people are only useful to management, as the various characters essentially deliver the bad news to existing audiences. superficially, it looks as though young people thought up the move towards 'popularisation' themselves. but imv they didn't, theyre just puppets. i sincerely doubt that in the longterm that the changes are actually what any young person would actually want. the changes are self destructive, risk shortening their own careers, logically. even if they have a real interest in a specific type of music, they wouldn't get the chance to express it, as the changes imply that younger people have low expectations of both culture, and of the beeb. the implication is that they will listen to any old rubbish, as long as it's put across in a jaunty, 'youthful' style. imo this is deeply insulting to young people, who might well take themselves, and their specific interests much more seriously in reality?

however, ageism is really useful to institutional managment, as they can exploit the subject of age, play diversity like a hand of cards, in any way they fancy. the trust can (mis)interpret your post as 'sour grapes', and 'ageist' in its self! which is suitably distracting, makes adequate cover for the actual ageism implied by the changes forced on middle aged/older audiences, at the hands of the trust/controllers..... at a guess, none of whom are young people, and all of whom are apparently more than willing to sell out to a useless form of progress, if it secures them a decent pension.

all that people require is that it should be there - as long as it's mainstream pop.

yes, a complete departure from the concept of 100% engagement by listeners ....of any age. at this rate people might listen to commercial/local stations and see little difference in beeb content whilst they multi-task, and treat culture as wallpaper!

R3 Tw. 45,502 Fo. 5,674

so, there's nothing that baffling about this numerical analysis imo, it's a reflection of recent changes, that illustrate statistically that the changes in communication methods aren't necessarily going to work; and that gaining new listeners of a specific age is quite possibly a lost cause longterm, even if they continue to debase/trivialise r3 content.

the trust may as well be aiming content at people of a specific height and weight - and failing at this objective as well! they must know that younger audiences have a huge amount of choice as regards access to content of their given musical taste, the days of them being a manipulatable, easily influenced 'cluster' are long gone. though i suspect the trust know this deep down, and they just see youth as a suitable excuse for the demolition job currently in process.

[Lateralthinking1]

I always go back to the thought that as a child I was expected to stand up on a bus for adults. Now I am a middle aged adult I am expected to stand up on a bus for children. In this way, we are another "lost" generation. The generation that never had the right to sit in the seat. One thinks of Rosa Parks. For all this I blame all the high-flying parents, ex-punk rockers, and the high-flying grandparents, ex-hippies. Back in the day, they added colour to what could be a grey world. Like them, I was all for counter-culture and advances in youth representation. Every generation must change things and things did have to change.

But the dominant culture always has to be older in my view. Not fixed - but it has to say "this is our place and that is yours". It should add: "One day you will say the same to your children". To structure all culture formally to the young is socially destabilizing. It disrespects those who are older. Those undertaking it lack the self-respect of their current ages. And it does the young few favours culturally. It affects their creativity. It narrows their options. Vibrant youth culture needs something it can counter. Furthermore, as populations become older, more people want something into which to grow, otherwise they are bored.

I honestly believe that the diminishing of mature culture is precisely why much of youth culture is so blandly unmusical and violent. It enables the most negative aspects of adolescence to flourish - the boredom, the nihilism. And because the idiots in charge have no backbone, this is then encouraged more and more to be the size that fits all. What in fact we are seeing here with Twitter, Facebook, Breakfast on 3 etc is the imposition of a regime that is as narrow in its way as the Soviet one except it is in itself a counter to that kind of thing. I am afraid that Sir Thompson and his ilk are just adolescents in mansions and suits.

[Russ]

On the numbers (and yes, they are interesting), we should bear in mind that the BBC has had a recent about turn on tweeting policy - originally, machines pumped them out in splatter-gun mode ("And coming up next on Radio 4 is..."), but the BBC realised that everyone got completely pee'd off by this approach, and the tweets are now human-crafted and somewhat more selective.

How much paid time do R3 employees spend online tweeting? Couldn't they be spending that time improving the online content?

Everyone spends too much time tweeting, but BBC employees regard such activity as 'improving online content'. The contentious notion here is 'content': from a broadcasters point of view, tweeting about content is content. Are not our discussions on this board about content also not enhancing (in some way) that content? (At least, to those of us who read things here.)

The point about 'no musical tweets' is interesting. It suggests that however important, indeed necessary, to people's lives the ubiquitous music is, all that people require is that it should be there - as long as it's mainstream pop.

Yes, I think that's generally true up to a point: 'popular/mainstream' music will dominate, but there are so many genres and subcultures that the analysis begins to break down. 6Music has a very healthy twitter following (60k), and the largest digital-only listenership (c 1.3m) for example, but there's not that many tweets from its followers in response. They're contented consumers, and the broadcast tweets are mere adjuncts to enjoying their particular musical niche/era/sensibility. The same goes for R3 I guess, albeit with a more specialist niche. Folk music (the new 'rock') is experiencing a revival, but tends to be active (in online terms) on a more local (geographical) level. I suppose my point about Elisabeth Mahoney's Guardian radio review of the year is that 'musical radio events' did not feature with an equivalence to 'speech radio events', although she tends to concentrate on speech anyway, so maybe that is not so surprising - a paper like the Guardian has other reviewers/critics who will cover the various musical genres, who no doubt will be doing their reviews in their own way, but my feeling is that they will concentrate on the new releases and the concert highlights of the year. Whilst R3 reflects many of these, and indeed is an instigator of many of them, any radio station when in the mode of merely replaying old records doesn't rate much as 'news'. That doesn't in itself make a station less interesting or popular of course, so the tweeting game should be seen as a game, and a rather peculiar one.

Russ

[handsomefortune]

It enables the most negative aspects of adolescence to flourish - the boredom, the nihilism in a vacuum.

agree lateralthinking1, other than the word 'enable', imv dominant corporations promote, influence, and profit from capitalising on (temporary negative) traites of teens, foisting them on ever more generations, if they get half the chance. the games industry has helped no end in merging teens/mid aged cross over in this sense.

the last thing in the world that audiences might expect is that public institutions might follow suite, downgrade accordingly. people pay a license fee to offset negative commercial trends ..not endorse them, or worse, emulate them.

imv 'youth' doesn't enter into this equation. (remember, forum poster pmartel, who explained that the downgrade has already been completed on the canadian equivalant of the beeb...it had nothing to do with young people, any more than the r3 changes have)

i don't know any young people who 'want' this scenario.... as i see it, they're just pawns useful to the real culprits as cover apparently. arguably, it's not about young peoples' cultural needs, any more than it's about mid aged/older peoples' needs. it seems merely a method of deleting, or hiding the opinions and tastes of any intelligent people, but especially the views/tastes of mid/older generations, as for some reason they are perceived a threat.

a similar fog of bs had gathered over r4, which i find unlistenable nowadays, bar the odd programme selected from the schedule....i wouldn't dream of switching r4 on, on the off chance, as in the past. r3 remains 'best the beeb still has' 10.00pm onward ....(as long as it's not wall to wall tory chunterings, similar to r4's late evening content).

[Russ]

Cor blimey, I go off for a cuppa and do some other things, and a whole load of posts arrive!

It enables the most negative aspects of adolescence to flourish - the boredom, the nihilism.

I don't mean to quote you out of full context lat, but isn't that what they said about us when we started buying transistor radios and Cliff Richard records?

Russ

[Serial_Apologist]

Cor blimey, I go off for a cuppa and do some other things, and a whole load of posts arrive!


I don't mean to quote you out of full context lat, but isn't that what they said about us when we started buying transistor radios and Cliff Richard records?

Russ

A very good point Russ: I well remember the manner in which big business co-opted youth cultures in the 1960s, exploiting the baby boomers' quest for independence from residual Victorian attitudes among our parent's generation as a science-based new future beckoned. "Catch them young" seems to have been the catchphrase adapted from Lenin: make 'em into obedient little consumers. The point worth considering was that, prior to then, advertising did not target the young to anything like the same extent; up until the coming of age of that post-war generation there was no high-earning youth demographic worth targetting. Go back still further, and the working class existed solely to make merchandise for the middle and upper classes.

One thing "the left" failed in general to take into account in the 50s and 60s was the growth of consumerism. The sheer size of the youth demographic was the source of its power as employers sought fresh labour power to rebuild the economy, and in paying for it conferred choice of employment and purchasing power. A few intellectuals stood out, Marcuse etc., but were sidelined. Today that has all changed: what future? must be answered by what kind of future; and of course the BBC's cultural aspirations are left begging. Criticism of today's Occupy movement for lacking any central ideological, tactical or strategic thrust has a lot going for it; what I do find healthy in the O.M. however is that, whatever "new" ideology emerges out of all this mess capitalism has put us in, scales are falling from eyes on a mass scale; it will finally be well positioned to take on board the ephemeral, illusory, unsustainable character of the dream represented by consumerism in ways we were not able to back then, when the tide swept against us and we resorted to non-remodelled thinking and all the old slogans which I still see gracing Socialist Worker.

S-A

[Lateralthinking1]

I agree handsomefortune's comments.

Russ - They did but I do think the current context is different. Radio 1 arrived more than a decade after rock and roll as the other stations became 2, 3 and 4. By moving slowly, the BBC had a ready made audience rather than attempting to manufacture one. The hot under the collar brigade had qualms about whether there should be youth culture of that kind at all. You know, "should it ever be allowed to join us in the living room or will it make a mess with its toys?" So in those respects it was very different.

While there were record pluggers from the outset, along with set playlists, youth culture was not hammered in like a brick to the broader national infrastructure and private enterprise. Nor were those two things a young lovers' embrace with "The Joy of Product" on the mantel shelf. Even the introduction of commercial radio in the early 1970s was accompanied by regulation that looked to the BBC as setting the gold standard. Only perhaps with the abolition of needle time in 1988 - something that was regarded, possibly wrongly, as an irritation to diverse broadcasting - was there a sea change with noticeable plummeting.

Next, Bannister's night of the long knives on Radio 1 in the 1990s which was all very well in itself. However, along with the deregulation of commercial stations and their takeover by conglomerates, it triggered an emphasis on competitiveness. This has become an unstoppable juggernaut. Now everything on the BBC is mashed up. It all has to criss-cross. Everyone must network with Annie Mac. Actually, turning to Radio 3 and Radio 4, any decent library is like a sage. Sages don't compete because they don't need to and, anyhow, that is stuff for the school sports day. No, if sages are not to be worthless, they guide with wisdom and they don't wear the latest trainers.

I really don't mind if a 16 year old decides that he wants to be Corn Flakes. No doubt he can speak in more ways through self-marketing than we ever thought a cereal could do, even if it can't hear us. But what I find disappointing is that we all have to live now in a Corn Flake country with a Corn Flake Government. Our corporations and companies are run by Corn Flake people. Everything on radio is a Corn Flake station. Corn Flake Culture is Youth Culture, so we are all told, and we all must be a part of it.

In 1973, Cliff Richard, by then in his thirties, entered the Eurovision Song Contest. The song was "Power to all our Friends". At the time it seemed sadly in the middle of the road. In this current climate, the title looks dangerously anarchic.

[eighthobstruction]

Cadburys Flake maybe !!....only the crumbliest....

Does Roger Scruton have a Twit feed??....

[Serial_Apologist]

Does Roger Scruton have a Twit feed??....

Doesn't need one. Is one.

[MrGongGong]

Doesn't need one. Is one.

[Russ]

Oh Lat, what a wonderful posting. You had me chuckling out loud. Your Cornflake paragraph is an absolute classic.

Russ

[handsomefortune]

http://www.for3.org/forums/showthread.php?3356-Delivering-Quality-First-%28DQF%29-cuts/page10

only a few days left for listeners' reflections on the beeb dqf. go to the last post on the thread (from aeolium) which has the appropriate links.

[Don Petter]

Switched on in the car a little before 2 pm today to hear KD asking for tweets in the Lunchtime Concert, so they've now invaded the afternoon, well past the old noon watershed.

[Frances_iom]

Switched on in the car a little before 2 pm today to hear KD asking for tweets in the Lunchtime Concert,

KD is possibly a special case where crowd sourcing information is guaranteed to be an improvement - I pointed out sometime ago that R3 is fairly quicky heading to a 7.30-9.30pm weekdays only ghetto of an evening concert - the rest of the usual listening day witll be easy listening (CFm-lite or R2.5 depending on your viewpoint)