An Impending Crisis of Imagination: Data‐Driven Personalization in Public Service Broadcasters

Abstract

This paper explores how the introduction of recommendation systems in public service broadcasting (PSB) poses a threat to its publicness. Relying among others on observations on how the European Broadcasting Union (EBU) and the Dutch Foundation for Public Broadcasting (NPO) are currently tackling ‘Big Data’, it identifies an impending crisis of imagination. Although public broadcasters acknowledge the need to do things differently from their commercial counterparts,their data‐driven approaches operate within commercial frameworks. Furthermore, the paper considers how the values of public broadcasters can be implemented into the design of recommendation systems. In conclusion, it proposes ‘real social analytics’ (Couldry et al., 2016) as an approach that can help them explore how they can use their digital presence to fulfill their social aims, and perhaps more fundamentally redefine the terms under which they are known.