Selective Taste.

I grew up with watching PBS fairly regularly, as it is one of few channels my non-cable subscribing family has access to. As Mike pointed out in his post, PBS' longstanding staple programming Masterpiece (Theatre) has undergone a form of rebranding that has made "status striving more accessible than it once was." I believe that this rebranding and its effects extend beyond Masterpiece. I have found myself interested in the issue of the accessibility of PBS in general. PBS has long been accessible to anyone with a television set and and antenna, however when I was young there was only one PBS affiliate station available to me, KVIE channel 6 in my case. Since the government mandated switch to digital broadcast, this has not exactly been the case. I now have access to channel 6.1, 6.2 and 6.3, all of which airing different programming at different times, and aiming for different audiences at different times as well. This "multiplexing" delivery format has reminded me of another network that is considered to be a social signifier of class and taste, HBO. This strategy allows PBS and their affiliates to reuse their programming at no extra cost with the potential of ultimately bringing in more viewers throughout the day. No longer are PBS watchers beholden to the schedule that has been set for them with children's programming in the mornings and late afternoons, with cooking shows sandwiched between these blocks, Masterpiece and Nova in the primetime slots, and news programming such as Frontline and Charlie Rose in the later evenings. The morning hours are no longer reserved for children, for a lone adult without children can simply switch to another variant of the channel and enjoy a show about gardening. Beyond this, many of us accessed PBS with a television at all through their online streaming video archive and handy PBS app for mobile devices. While the PBS taste is more accessible, it has also become more selective. It is no longer simply the affiliates to blame for censoring our consumption (as described in Allison Perlman's Blacking Out "Black Journal") but individual audience member.

Over the past week, I too have used these varying forms of accessibility to pick and choose what I specifically wanted to consume. A Frontline episode about the "Culture of Liking," a few Nature episodes (I am particularly excited about "My Bionic Pet" which is coming in April), and an episode of one of my favorite PBS programs, California's Gold (featuring the American treasure that was Huell Howser.)