Social Television: Audience and Political Engagement

The hypothesis of this work is that social TV can add to traditional TV audiencehood a sense of collective belonging—“we the public”—that is fundamental for any political action. After a quantitative account of users’ patterns of activity during half a TV season, a qualitative methodology is adopted to understand the variety of social TV logics. Thus, a model of four different kinds and meanings of using social TV is developed: from the most engaged (civic-informative use of social TV) to the most recreational (the game use), from the outburst of emotions (emotional use) to the identity-building and awareness use. Each of those represents various forms of relationships among individuals in a social medium environment, and between them and other actors of the wider contemporary mediated public space, such as civic and political groups, and political news media professionals.