Microsoft Word - Boccia Artieri-et-al.docx Selected Papers of Internet Research 15: The 15th Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers Daegu, Korea, 22-24 October 2014 Suggested Citation (APA): Boccia Artieri, G., Gemini, L., Giglietto, F., & Orefice, M. (2014, October 22- 24). From #x6 to #ServizioPubblico: cross-genre analysis of tv audience participatory practices in Italy. Paper presented at Internet Research 15: The 15th Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers. Daegu, Korea: AoIR. Retrieved from http://spir.aoir.org. FROM #XF6 TO #SERVIZIOPUBBLICO: CROSS-GENRE ANALYSIS OF TV AUDIENCE PARTICIPATORY PRACTICES IN ITALY Giovanni Boccia Artieri University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy Laura Gemini University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy Fabio Giglietto University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy Mario Orefice University of Urbino Carlo Bo, Italy Trans-media usage practices, with a specific reference to the ones that imply strong correlation between TV viewing and online content production, are quickly becoming a fascinating field of study for scholars and practitioners. According to Nielsen, during 2013, about 36 million people sent out 990 million of Tweets about TV (Nielsen SocialGuide 2014). At the same time, growing number of studies focus on users’ communicative dynamics while watching specific TV programs or genres (Geerts and De Grooff 2009). From surveys about participatory viewing styles and repertoires (Mitchell et al. 2010, Cesar and Geerts 2011) to market-oriented researches (Proulx and Shepatin 2012), and more general attempts to go beyond Habermasian definition of public sphere (de Zúñiga, Jung, and Valenzuela 2012, Fuchs 2014). From media adoption perspective, Italy seems to be in line with general trend. Showing increasing shares both in TV viewing and Internet usage. In fact while, on the one side, average TV audience in a normal day raised of 1.8% from 2012 and “average time viewed” (the average daily time spent by every TV users) of 1.3% (Nielsen 2013), on the other side, total amount of people using social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, wikis or traditional websites passed from 53,8% to 58,7% (+5%) during 2013 (Istat 2013). Despite this complex and interesting scenario, analyses and researches aimed at highlight some kind of correlations between different TV viewing styles and online contents actually represents an underestimated field of study. Opposite to this trend, this paper presents the first large-scale comparative study of Twitter contributors’ behavior in commenting two different types of TV format. Trying to validate (or refute) the main assumption according to which, while TV programs based on pure entertainment are more likely to develop within participatory audience some kind of self-representative or conversational practice tout court, political TV show viewing should be mainly focused on developing a sort of conversation-based civic engagement in which information as well as communication production and sharing appear to be highly covered with political/civic sense (Bruns and Stieglitz 2012). Therefore, we will especially attempt to answer the following research questions: RQ1. Are Twitter contributors taking part to conversations around political talk shows, different from contributors commenting around talent shows? Do they show different patterns of behavior concerning form, topic and the explicit Twitter recipient? RQ2. What are (if there is) the most significant elements of continuity/discontinuity between these contributors regarding contents as well as communicative styles? RQ3. To what extent socio-technical features of “Twitter as platform” influence the emergence of TV-based participatory practices? To answer the above research questions we collected, during TV season 2012/2103, two complete datasets of Tweets. The first consists of Tweets (n=474,167) belonging to one of the most engaging Italian political talk show named “Servizio Pubblico”. During the 28 episodes aired during the season, we observed an average of 17,196 Tweets per episode. The second dataset contains Tweets (n=772,018 Tweets) published during the 9 live episodes aired during the season 2012/2013 of “X Factor” Italy. In both cases, we choose to collect only the Twitter messages marked by the official hashtags launched by TV program itself (#ServizioPubblico, #XF6). Instead of random sampling the data – a strategy not always effective with highly skewed distribution such the one we are dealing with – we decided to focus our analysis on peaks of Twitter activity. For both datasets we calculated a by minute time series of original Tweets (excluding both reply and RT). On these time series, we run an algorithm for peaks detection (Marcus 2011) identifying 115 peaks in the #XF6 dataset and 127 peaks in the #ServizioPubblico one. A content analysis was carried on Tweets (n=3,000) created in a random sample of 10 peaks for each dataset. For these 10 peaks we also analyzed the corresponding TV scene. References Bruns, A., and Stieglitz, S. 2012. Quantitative approaches to comparing communication patterns on Twitter. In Journal of Technology in Human Services, 30 (3-4), 160-185. Cesar, P., and Geerts, D. 2011. Past, present, and future of social TV: A categorization. In Proceedings of 2011 IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking Conference (CCNC), 347-351. Las Vegas, NV: Consumer Communication and Networking Conferences (CCNC). Couldry, N.; Livingstone, S.; and Markham, T. 2007. Media consumption and public engagement: beyond the presumption of attention. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Dahlgren, P. 1995. Television and the Public Sphere: Citizenship, Democracy, and the Media. London: Sage. de Zúñiga, H.G., Jung, N., and Valenzuela, S. 2012. Social Media Use for News and Individuals’ Social Capital, Civic Engagement and Political Participation. In Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication (17) 3: 319-336. Doughty, M., Rowland, D., and Lawson, S. 2012. Who is on your sofa?: TV Audience Communities and Second Screening Social Networks. In Proceedings of the 10th European conference on Interactive TV and video - EuroiTV ’12, 79-86. New York, NY: Association for Computing Machinery. Fuchs, C. ed. 2014. Social Media. A Critical Introduction. London: Sage. Geerts, D., and De Grooff, D. 2009. Supporting the Social Uses of television: sociability heuristics for social TV. In proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 595-604. Boston, US: SIGCHI Conference. Giglietto, F., and Selva, D. 2014. Second Screen and Participation: a Content Analysis on a Full Season Dataset. In Journal of Communication. Forthcoming. Highfield, T., Harrington, S., and Bruns, A. 2013. Twitter as a Technology for Audiencing and Fandom. in Information, Communication & Society 16(3): 315–339. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2012.756053. Istat, 2013, Annuario Statistico dell’Istat, Istat-Istituto Nazionale di Statistica, Roma, IT. Larsson, A. O. 2013. Tweeting the viewer: Use of Twitter in a talk show context. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 57(2): 135–152. doi:10.1080/08838151.2013.787081 Livingstone, S. 2005. Audiences and publics: when cultural engagement matters for the public sphere. Bristol: Intellect. Marcus, A., Bernstein, M. S., Badar, O., Karger, D. R., Madden, S., & Miller, R. C. (2011). Twitinfo. In Proceedings of the 2011 annual conference on Human factors in computing