Understanding Engagement and Willingness to Speak Up in Social-Television: A Full-Season, Cross-Genre Analysis of TV Audience Participation on Twitter

Abstract

The widespread use of digital platforms has changed the way people watch television. Despite an abundance of empirical studies, full-season, cross-genre analyses of different TV formats are rare. Based on a data set of 1,383,414 tweets, this study aims to close this gap by comparing Twitter commentaries around the 2012-2013 seasons of the Italian edition of The X Factor and the political talk show Servizio Pubblico. For each episode, we identify peaks of Twitter engagement and analyze the corresponding TV scene, revealing the role played by suspense and surprise in catalyzing the engagement of online audiences. A content analysis of 12,640 tweets created during peaks of engagement reveals how willingness to speak up varies when the topic is politics rather than entertainment.

Understanding Communities via Hashtag Engagement: A Clustering Based Approach

“…There has been a diverse array of academic work using hashtags. Some of this work has leveraged hashtags to find relevant information on Twitter (Conover et al 2011;Burnap et al 2014;Giglietto et al 2015;Letierce et al 2010;Vieweg et al 2010). Other work has used hashtags to predict popularity of Tweets (Suh et al 2010;Naveed et al 2011;Morchid et al 2014;Hong, Dan, and Davison 2011;Petrovic, Osborne, and Lavrenko 2011), study information flow (Burnap et al 2014;Romero, Meeder, and Kleinberg 2011;Starbird and Palen 2012;Weng, Menczer, and Ahn 2013;Naveed et al 2011), and label data, e.g.…”

“…Some work has focused on extracting (Cook, Kenthapadi, and Mishra 2013) and analyzing (Budak and Agrawal 2013) these chat hashtags. Another study investigated periodically occurring hashtags for select TV shows (Giglietto et al 2015) and community engagement with these TV shows. However, these works on chats and TV shows did not compare how engaging community content is with other content.…”

Towards a theory of well-being in digital sports viewing behavior

“…Live sports viewing through Social TV has extended the fan base and removed the capacity constraints at stadiums (Milne, 2016) encouraging sports lovers to view the events with infused momentum contributing to the sports industry’s growth (Rogers et al , 2017). Literature suggests that Social TV provides enhanced entertainment (Lin et al , 2016), team identification (Yoshida et al , 2018), social connectedness (Waycott et al , 2019), escapism (Lin et al , 2016), sports knowledge (Wang, 2013), expression of opinion (Giglietto et al , 2016), information seeking (Guo, 2018) and content verification (Hahn and Cummins, 2018) to sports viewers in a more sophisticated manner than from the stadium. The instant sharing of opinions and feelings about the game to a broader audience group via a text-based chat function available on Social TV offered better self-expression options (Wakefield and Bennett, 2018; Hilvert-Bruce et al , 2018).…”