Oil and vinegar?

We touched on this just a little at the Columbus Social Media Cafe meet-up in January, and I’m investigating some of these questions for an issue paper in my English 567 class, so I’m curious what everyone thinks.

It seems to me, at least, that the fusion of social media and public media is almost a contradiction in words. (Well, maybe not so stark, but pardon the Queen of Hyperbole here.) PBS upholds its reputation for quality through strong editorial standards and policies, but social media is by definition user-generated, so a conflict might arise between the top-down model of PBS editorial governance and the bottom-up paradigm of social media. Some questions to consider:

• Should social media, bubbling out of public opinion and interest, be edited at all?
• Could such editing ever be completely unbiased? How would it be done?
• If PBS’ editorial actions are minimized, will the results still be “quality”?
• More broadly, what is quality in social media?  (Is Robert Pirsig ringing in anyone else’s ears right about now?)
• Will readers trust blogs endorsed by a governing body, even one as reliable as PBS, to be “authentic”?

You can read about public radio’s forays into social media here in a report put together by the Center for Social Media at American University. From the looks of it, WOSU is in the vanguard of social media integration. (Woohoo!) What else can we do?