Building Desirable and Resilient Public Media Futures: Establishing the Centre for Public Values, Technology & Society

Now more than ever it matters that we understand the challenges posed by data and technology for media, society, and democracy because how we build technology deeply matters for our digital futures. While a growing body of research exists into these challenges, the public service media context has received surprisingly little attention. Dr Rhianne Jones will lead the BBC Centre for Public Values, Technology & Society, supported by a UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship to address these important challenges and advance responsible, society-centred innovation in the public and wider media sector. Located in BBC Research and Development, with its remit to develop technologies in the public interest, Dr Jones will lead the Centre and its expert partner network to advance understanding of issues and responses needed for a healthy future digital UK society.

Our digital world has been built on data-driven technologies. These technologies play an integral role in everyday life, impacting our access to information, experiences and society in different ways. Data about individuals, groups and systems are collected and analysed in vast quantities, and with increasingly sophisticated algorithms in order to make decisions that can determine outcomes in important areas of our lives. No longer confined to online spaces, these technologies are increasingly all around us and they bring with them the potential for both enormous benefit and risks for people, communities, and society.

The media and creative industries play a fundamental role in our individual, cultural, and collective lives in a democracy but rapid advancements in online, mobile and connected media, underpinned by data-driven and AI systems are transforming the landscape at pace. From personalised content through to new synthetic forms of media, societal understanding of these technologies must not fall behind this technological development. To meet these challenges, media organisations must be equipped to draw from and contribute to state-of-the-art foundational research to inform technical innovation and maximise transfer and impact for socially beneficial ends. Public service media exists to serve the public with impartial and trusted content but emerging challenges stemming from developments in the digital landscape threaten to destabilise foundational public values such as trust and universality and we need new ways to understand, articulate and envision desirable public media futures. Publicly funded media have an especially important public service function and are connected, via policy and regulation, into government. As such, they provide a valuable and distinctive opportunity to research and innovate with data and digital services with the potential to deliver direct benefits by acting as a case study for more general impact across the industry.

Dr Jones' Centre will radically enrich interdisciplinary approaches to innovation by enhancing the application of the social sciences and humanities to address important issues facing a data-driven society, using the important lens of changing public service media, its provision and its use. Through its specific focus on public service values and the creation of public value in relation to media provision, the work of the Centre will foster socially responsible innovation through research excellence and enhance the future reliance and effectiveness of public service provision, thus improving the quality of digital life in the UK and worldwide.

In 2022, the BBC marked 100 years of public service broadcasting; as we reflect on its role in shaping the technologies and communications that defined our public sphere, we must now turn to the important question of how to build a healthy media ecosystem for our future digital society.