Whatsappsport: Using Whatsapp While Viewing Sports Events

Abstract

Viewing sports events was always qualitatively different from the viewing experience of other genres. The social experience and emotional investment of sports viewers created unique viewing habits, in which second screens and social media effectively extend the experience of the millions of concurrent sports viewers wishing to share their feelings with each other. The enormous popularity of Whatsapp groups in recent years, and especially sports-focused groups, has made this app an integral element in event viewing, and created a unique viewing dynamic. This study analyzes the discourse in Whatsapp sports groups in Israel as its members view the 2018 World Cup soccer games, in an effort to identify the new role of second screens during sports broadcasts. An analysis of group messages shared by Whatsapp sports groups whose members cover a diverse range of ages and geographic locations basically shows that, in contrast to other media genres in which second screening is not necessarily related to the content broadcast on the primary screen, sports fans demonstrate an absolute commitment to the primary broadcast when second screening. On a deeper level, this study identified four main functions of Whatsapp groups during sports broadcasts: a social agent that supervises and controls the nature and quality of the primary screen broadcast, the generator of discourse that extols viewers’ expertise and effectively challenges traditional sport hierarchies, an active role in game management as fans attempt to influence game outcomes, and a means for extending fans’ celebrations of victory beyond the boundaries of the game.

The Routinization of Media Events: Televised Sports in the Era of Mega-TV

“…The situation today is significantly different: audience participation during the game (on platforms such as Twitter, Whatsapp, Facebook, and others) has become an integral part of the broadcast itself (with invitations to comment); so too active involvement (Tamir 2020), such as immediately re-viewing the exciting events on the field (e.g., goals, passes, etc.) due to digitized television.…”

Media Multitasking: A Bibliometric Approach and Literature Review

“…More specifically, we noticed that six studies within the last years specifically focused on media multitasking behavior when watching sport events on television. This specific focus on media multitasking while watching sports broadcastings did not receive any attention before 2018 (Jensen et al, 2018 ), while the other five papers on this topic have only been published in 2020 (e.g., Billings et al, 2020 ; Tamir, 2020 ). As the interest in this topic has thus only emerged within the last years, it is evident that they did not yet initiate a full-fledged research topic.…”

Experiencia docente con entornos virtuales en psicología del deporte, antes y durante la pandemia Covid-19

“…En este sentido, el nivel de satisfacción que tienen los participantes frente a la conferencia es significativo, pero se debe mejorar el tiempo asignado para las discusiones concerniente a la respuesta de inquietudes de los participantes. Adicionalmente, se resalta el uso de WhatsApp como herramienta líder para la comunicación relacionada con la convocatoria a este tipo de conferencias y su afinidad con eventos deportivos (Ahmed et al, 2020;Tamir, 2020).…”