Of big birds and bayonets: hybrid Twitter interactivity in the 2012 Presidential debates

Coproduction or cooptation? Real-time spin and social media response during the 2012 French and US presidential debates

“…We first situate presidential debates in the class of 'media events' originally theorized during the height of the broadcast media system by Dayan and Katz (1992), but note that the form and implications of such events are undergoing change along without media system (Chadwick, 2010;Freelon and Karpf, 2015). This gives debates an intriguing dual quality of being both highly produced and polished broadcast spectacles and the sites of real-time discussion, debate and contestation of meaning in social media.…”

“…This is not a wholesale displacement of broadcast media in favor of digital: individuals continue to respond strongly to images that reach them via television . Today viewers respond to the 'first screen' of television with one or more 'second screens': the laptops, tablets and smartphones that connect them to friends and other networks through messaging, E-mail and social media (Anstead and O'Loughlin, 2011;Giglietto andSelva, 2014, Freelon andKarpf, 2015).…”

The Challenges of Democratizing News and Information: Examining Data on Social Media, Viral Patterns and Digital Influence

“…Because high-profile network hubs are paying attention to the same event, Freelon says, and social sharing behavior also spikes around events, communications power can shift incrementally to otherwise little-known individuals. 27 Similarly, Zeynep Tufekci of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, argues that during periods of political unrest situations, where dissidents are combating repressive regimes, certain "networked microcelebrity" activists can capture significant amounts of public attention, pulling some of the power away from traditional media. The Arab uprisings that began in 2011 amply displayed this new phenomenon, which suggests "substantive alterations to the power relations between mass media, formal opposition institutions, and states compared with earlier periods," Tufekci writes.…”

Follow the leader! Direct and indirect flows of political communication during the 2013 Italian general election campaign

“…Celebrities may offer politicians some potential for indirect communication because their followers may include many citizens who are not particularly interested in politics, thus functioning, in Freelon and Karpf's (2013) terminology, as "bridging elites", allowing political messages to reach citizens who are not interested enough to pay attention to the political establishment on social media. To the extent that celebrities follow party leaders and share content originally posted by them, their social media presence may thus resemble the role played by talk shows and "infotainment" television programs in allowing low-interest voters to acquire political information that they would not normally seek (Delli Carpini and Williams 2001) and bypass the opportunity to avoid political messages afforded by high-choice media (Prior 2007).…”