The final AoIR 2015 session is our panel on social television, and starts with a co-authored paper presented by Darryl Woodford (slides to follow soon below).
Darryl begins by noting that raw social media engagement numbers for television are useful only to an extent: they are usually not normalised to account for specific factors, and simply offer raw quantities.
Nielsen SocialGuide's Twitter engagement statistics for social media follow that pattern, for example, and obviously shows on major TV channels do better than those on niche cable channels. Beamly's social media rankings are skewed by …
The next AoIR 2015 speaker is Fabio Giglietto, whose interest is in social television practices in Italy, around political talkshow Servizio Pubblico and reality TV contest X-Factor. What moments of these broadcasts trigger audience engagement? What similarities or differences are there in communication styles?
Fabio's project gathered relevant tweets from the shows' hashtags, and generated a number of key volumetric statistics on user activity; X-Factor audiences were considerably more active. They then algorithmically identified the major peaks in each of the shows' episodes, and explored the key dynamics for each peak.
Key drivers of audience engagement identified were surprise …
The annual end-of-year conference season is upon us again, and I’ll be heading off tomorrow to the annual Association of Internet Researchers conference – the most important conference in my field. In spite of the considerable troubles AoIR has faced this year – its first conference location, Bangkok, was no longer feasible following the military coup in Thailand, and there still seem to be some teething problems with the replacement location in Daegu, Korea – it will be great to catch up with leading colleagues in the field again.
This year, we’re presenting the first outcomes of our latest big …
The final keynote at ASMC14 is by the fabulous Hallvard Moe, whose focus is on the intersections between social media and public service broadcasting. How can media researchers contribute to rethinking public service broadcasting? Defining PSB is difficult, but there is often a belief that policy makers know it when they see it; PSB is an inherently contested concept, coined a very long time ago in a very different context – even in Europe alone, how PSBs are positioned and organised is very different across different countries.
What such institutions have in common, though, is the general aim that PSBs …
The final speaker in this ASMC14 session is Marie Gillespie, whose interest is in the tweeting of global events – she focusses here especially on the controversial Sochi Olympics in early 2014, which were also affected by the unfolding political crisis in Ukraine.
One player in the media environment around the Olympics is the Russian state broadcaster Russia Today, whose mission is to present a Russian perspective on world news. It receives $300m per annum, at the same time that comparable public diplomacy broadcasters like BBC World Service or the Australia Network are being downsized or discontinued.
The next speaker in this ASMC14 session is Rhiannon Were, whose focus is on the use of social media alongside public broadcasting in the Palestinian Territories. People there feel very powerless towards their leaders, given the lack of effective governance and accountability frameworks, and two political talk shows with ancillary multiplatform elements, conducted in part in collaboration with BBC Arabic, have been created to address this problem. The shows reach an audience of some 500,000 viewers, and research is underway to inform programming, evaluate the project, and generate evidence of impact.
Palestinians have almost universal access to TV, radio, and …
Next up at ASMC14 is Philip Pond, whose focus is on tweets during televised political debates in Australia. He takes a particularly temporal perspective to his research, and highlights the impact of electronic media on our experience of time and space; there is a kind of hyper-fast network time which is qualitatively different from its predecessor, the time of the clock.
Philip's focus is on the Australian political talk show Q&A and it's associated hashtag #qanda, which has a weekly audience of around 900,000 viewers. It invites journalists, politicians, and other panellists to its conversations (centred around largely pre-scripted questions) …
The next session at ASMC14 is about social media and TV, and Donatella Selva is the first presenter, examining social TV in the Italian context. Television remains the main source of information for the Italian population, while some 44% of people use Facebook and some 10% are using Twitter. However, Twitter is also an elite medium attracting especially influential users, including journalists and celebrities.
Clear definitions of social TV are difficult. 'Hard' definitions focus on the technology, while 'soft' definitions point to the use of social media alongside television. It is also possible to distinguish between mere access, participation …
The next speaker at ASMC14 is Evelien D'heer, whose focus is on the use of Twitter as a backchannel to a Flemish political TV talkshow, Terzake. The show has now appointed a 'conversation manager' to guide the Twitter discussion, following a public Twitter spat over the quality of the programme: after criticism of the show's quality by a user, a patronising tweet from the programme makers was widely criticised, and the conversation manager is meant to improve producer/audience relations again.
In this case, then, social media and journalistic logics co-define the programme and its meanings. Evelien's project investigated this …
