Public TV’s “God In America” gets back to doing it right.
http://www.pbs.org/godinamerica/ the home of a recent Frontline, American Experience production of “God In America” for WGBH and PBS gets a lot right from an ‘understanding new media’ perspective. This is an incredibly welcome change from some other recent offerings and is well worth a serious look.
Particularly noteworthy are the very richly populated and sans Flash timeline feature, the full texts of the interviews, the link to the Pew religious knowledge quiz and the “God in the White House” feature.
The only glaring and, to me anyway, offensive aspect is the presumption in the ‘Faithbook’ that atheism isn’t on an equal footing with theism. The emotional experience one could call ‘spiritual’ is hardly inherently coupled with a belief in a god or gods. One has a right, especially in the US, not to believe in god as much as one has a right to choose which god to believe in and it’s a shame to me that this partly tax-payer funded project seems unwilling and unable to acknowledge that. That, however, is an editorial issue not a web implementation issue.
Major, major kudos to Sam Bailey and team. (scroll to the bottom here for web credits).
Of course Sam and I would bash heads on some details: No overview for the timeline? No captions or ready transcript link from the video player? But those matters for quibble and debate aside, this is what it should be. A home for a documentary film online that meaningfully adds value and potential for understanding the content using the web for what it’s so good at.
