89 No. 154 — February 2015 Jonathon Hutchinson Abstract The public service media (PSM) remit requires the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) to provide for minorities while fostering national culture and the public sphere. Social media platforms and projects – speciically ‘social TV’ – have enabled greater participation in ABC content consumption and creation; they provide opportunities for social participation in collaborative cultural production. However it can be argued that, instead of deconstructing boundaries, social media platforms may in fact reconstruct participation barriers within PSM production processes. This article explores ABC co-creation between Twitter and the #7DaysLater television program, a narrative-based comedy program that engaged its audience through social media to produce its weekly program. The article demonstrates why the ABC should engage with social media platforms to collaboratively produce content, with #7DaysLater providing an innovative example, but suggests skilled cultural intermediaries with experience in community facilitation should carry out the process. The ubiquitous communication environment bolstered through social media use has had a signiicant impact on journalistic practice (Hermida, 2012), global social and political protest (Howard and Hussain, 2013) and crisis communication (Bruns and Burgess, 2012). Social media not only provide a ‘convergence of user-created content and social connection’ (Burgess and Banks, 2013: 286), but also signify the decentralisation and disruption of communication models within media organisations. Social media provide a direct link from the audience to the facilitators of online platforms within media organisations, especially in the case of co-creating media across popular platforms such as Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. Moe (2013: 14) notes on social media platforms that ‘media organisations have ventured on to such services with their own content, aiming to reach new users’. The modus operandi of these platforms is to include the audience commentary during the program – for example, in the lower third of a television program – or to include the audience in the collaborative production of its content. The extent to which the user is involved in the collaborative production depends on the program, the type of content required and which media organisation is facilitating the content co-creation. The Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) has long experimented with combining social media and content production as a communication tool for the inclusion of its diverse audience, a requirement of its public service media (PSM) remit. Recently, the television program #7DaysLater extended the experimental capacity of co-creation with social media by ‘taking comedy to the scary arena of interactive storytelling PUBLIC SERVICE MEDIA AND SOCIAL TV: BRIDGING OR EXPANDING GAPS IN PARTICIPATION?