#n6406084

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Audience Adaptation: Water-cooler to Social Media

A major goal of television executives is to create content that people talk about so that they continue to watch the program, and the station can earn more through desirable advertising spots.  Memorable moments from the previous night’s episode of Friends, Seinfeld or the Sopranos were gossiped over so that viewers could disseminate and share their affection for the shows and it’s characters in what became called “water-cooler talk”.  

“History shows that new technology rarely result in the displacement of long-standing audience practices, but are typically blended into existing routines and activities instead” (Harrington 2013, 238).

With the rise in popularity of new media content such as the social media platform, Twitter, Harrington’s “long-standing audience practices”, ie water-cooler talk, are blended into the activity of watching a live television program with the phenomenon of live-tweeting, where Twitter users can make live comments and posts referring to what they are watching, that reach potentially millions of people.

HubShout (2013).

But these tweets offer more than just allowing fans to feel more connected.

The promotion from television networks to get audiences to join the conversation and live-tweet during programs is beneficial for the television program and the broadcasting networks that receive this free advertising, but also for market research companies that can analyse the digital data such tweets create and the data stores they contribute to.

Market researchers are now able to able to process information from the internet, and more specifically social media to understand audience behaviours and to identify target markets for products and services (Pérez-Latre, Portilla & Blanco 2011, 68). Similarly, networks can use this data to understand the activities of their viewers during certain programs, and allow them to make alterations that may attract more viewers of similar ilk. Through a process of “machine learning”, computers and analytics are able to use past data to provide a predictive analysis of future activities (Siegel 2013, 4).

Predictive analysis changes the game in that instead of providing forecasts, ie how many people will watch a program, it predicts, and says who will be watching the program (Siegel 2013, 12).

Highfield, Harrington and Bruns (2013,1) describe Twitter as a “technology of fandom” in that “it serves as a backchannel to television and other streaming audiovisual media, enabling users to offer their own running commentary on the universally shared media text of the event as it unfolds live”.

The activities such as water cooler talk that we took part in a decade ago aren’t dead, we’ve just converged them with new technologies, and adapted them to enable us to be a part of the conversation, wherever that may be. As Kevin Spacey said in his Edinburgh Television Festival address, “The water cooler has gone virtual, because the discussion is now online” (2013).

References

Francisco Javier Pérez-Latre, Portilla, I. & Blanco, C. S. 2011. “Social Networks, Media and Audiences: A Literature Review.” Communicacion Y Sociedad 14 (1): 63 - 74.

Harrington, Stephen. 2013. “Ch 18 Tweeting about the Telly: Live TV, Audiences, and Social Media.” In Twitter and Society edited by Katrin Weller, Axel Bruns, Jean Burgess, Merja Mahrt & Cornelius Puschmann, 237-248. New York, NY: Peter Lang.

Highfield, T., Harrington, S. and Bruns, A. 2013. ‘Twitter as a Technology for Audiencing and Fandom: The #Eurovision phenomenon’. Information, Communication & Society, 16 (3), 315-339.

Hubshout. 2013. "Nielsen Includes Twitter in TV Ratings: Impact on Social Media Marketing [VIDEO & INFOGRAPHIC]." Accessed May 1, 2014. http://hubshout.com/?Nielsen-Includes-Twitter-in-TV-Ratings:-Impact-on-Social-Media-Marketing-%5BVIDEO-&-INFOGRAPHIC%5D&AID=1039.

Spacey, Kevin. 2013. “James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture.” YouTube video, posted August 23. Accessed May 1, 2014. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0ukYf_xvgc.

Siegel, Eric. 2013. “Introduction – The Prediction Effect.” In Predictive Analytics, 1-16. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons Inc.

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Social Media and Activism - Are we just fooling ourselves?

In the highly connected world of Web 2.0, social networks have emerged as more than just ways to keep in touch with old friends, but tools that have the ability to enable messages to be spread like wildfire, to larger numbers at greater speeds than ever before, with social networks such as Facebook and Twitter being proven to have the ability to be used for more than sharing photos of cats and babies.

Political uprisings such as The Arab Spring, Moldova and Manilla demonstrations and their successes have largely been attributed to the medium that was used to spread the messages of action, social media (Shirky 2011), in particular, text-messaging and Twitter, but academics are split as to whether the use of such technology has in fact improved the success-rate of movements.  

With the speeds at which information can be researched and shared from one corner of the globe to the other, many researchers and lay-people believe that the power of activism has been enhanced. Sifry (2011) states  “What is emerging [is] a greatly expanded notion of the role of citizen not just as a passive consumer of political information and occasional voter, but as an active player, monitoring what government and politicians [are] doing, demanding a seat at the table and a view of the proceedings, sharing self-generated news of what [is] important, and participating in problem solving.” There is also the fact that with greater connectivity and access to information, individuals can more importantly have access to conversation (Shirky 2010) and be given a voice.

However, Gladwell (2010) claims that new media is not the hero many believe it is when it comes to activism in the 21st Century, arguing that people merely spreading the word doesn’t necessarily equate to committed action to a cause, but perhaps in well-meaning, yet potentially ineffective “slacktivism”. Gladwell refers to the human rights movements in the US during the 1950’s and 60’s, where news spreading from town-to-town, and state-to-state over days and weeks still had the same effect in mobilising activists as social media does today, if just at a slower rate, but with the critical factor being the “close-ties” to the cause, rather than the speed of the message.

Vitak et al. (2011,1) reinforce Gladwell’s sentiment, arguing that while social networks do give the opportunity to share opinions and news, ultimately the criticisms of slacktivism  refer to the “lack of connection among the members”.

One only has to check even the most commercial news websites to witness the viral nature of today’s media, where videos of school children interviewing the Prime Minister can spread to millions of people in a matter of hours. But the question remains, will the fact that more people have now been exposed to certain information result in actual change?  

The truth is that the argument could go on forever, that slacktivism may not lead to much more action, but that any action is better than none, and “the fact that barely committed actors cannot click their way to a better world does not mean that committed actors cannot use social media effectively” (Shirky, 2011).

  References

Gladwell, Malcom. 2010. “Small Change: Why the Revolution will not be Tweeted.” The New Yorker, October 4. Available at: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell?currentPage=all

Shirky, Clay. 2011 “The Political Power of Social Media: Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change.” Foreign Affairs 90:1. Available at: http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/67038/clay-shirky/the-political-power-of-social-media

Sifry, Micah. 2011. “WikiLeaks, Assange, and Why There's No Turning Back (Exclusive Excerpt)”. The Huffington Post, November 2. Accessed April 14, 2014. Available at:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/micah-sifry/wikileaks-assange-micah-sifry_b_820671.html

Vitak, J., Zube, P., Smock, A., Carr, C. T., Ellison, N., and Lampe, C. (2011). It’s Complicated: Facebook Users’ Political Participation in the 2008 Election. Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking, 14(3), 107-114.

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But first, let me use these new media tools to take a photo of myself to send you so that you can interpret the meaning I am trying to convey

Long has Western society been waiting for the return of true poetry, and the deep, resonant meanings that can be found within, seemingly written specifically for each reader or listener to hold dear to themselves.

The 16th Century gave us Sir William Shakespeare and his star-crossed lovers, witches, and pounds of merchant flesh. Later, America provided us with Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe, and the reading world hence grew its affinity towards bust-perching black birds.

But since then we have been waiting for our hearts and minds to be captured yet again in the swirl of emotions and fanciful lyrics that such artists can evoke. Many pretenders have come and gone in the search for true poetry. Bob-haired brits proved to be nothing but convenient distractions in the search for the noble art, travelling minstrels dressed up for show but lacking any real substance. The following decades proved to be just as barren. And the world waited.

Is this scarcity due to the changes in which we ourselves communicate to each other?

Is the reason for the lack of true artistic talent linked to the fact that we no-longer speak in the fashion of the great poets? Yes, we do speak and communicate differently now! Why, I myself am not penning these words, but typing them on a high-tech piece of hardware and software. Scholars argue that we now talk to each other personally less and less, but instead use such technologies to communicate, in a process aptly called Computer-mediated Communication (CMC), which Sauter (2014) states “is in direct contrast to the traditional face-to-face communication of old”.

Baron (2008, 3) describes how when faced with new technologies and practices, we as a people are often apprehensive at first, but then given some time to acclimatise, even those who do not use particular technologies are able to understand them (or the idea of them) enough to use them or descriptions of them in their vernacular. Are we without our artists because with the increased rate of technological advances, we have not quite reached a level of comfort at which we can communicate (both about and through) our new terms and expressions?

Skovholt, Gronning & Kankaanranta (2014) have written scholarly texts, probably ignored by most as they involve new and scary technologies, that describe the increased use of emoticons in the workplace. The emoticon being at first a way for people using typing mediums to express their emotions without the use of words, has thus gone from fringe use to mainstream, but nonetheless is an apt example of new media communication.

But the night is darkest before the dawn, dear reader, for we have been rewarded for our patient waiting, and are now gifted with the creative works that capture the mood of our times, and how we communicate via new media:

Our modern masterpiece:

Thus we have evolved past emoticons to Emojis, gifs, to photographs of the self to communicate amongst ourselves in a seemingly desperate attempt to use anything at all except actual words. The “selfie” is an example of an answer to Baron’s (2008, 4) question “How does our language evolve, along with changes in the way we interact with other people, as communication technologies become increasingly domesticated?”

The selfie is but one example of how images can transport meaning from the sender to receiver without the use of words, and shows how certain tools can be appropriated to allow new media communication.

References

Baron, Naomi. 2008. “Ch 1: Email to Your Brain: Language in an Online and Mobile World.” In Always On: Language in an Online and Mobile World, 3-10. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chainsmokers. (2014).”#SELFIE (Official Music Video) - The Chainsmokers”. YouTube video, posted January 29. Accessed April 13, 2014.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdemFfbS5H0

Sauter, Theresa. 2014. “Week 6 Lecture PowerPoint slides – New Media Communication”. Accessed April 1, 2014. http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_4_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fcontent%2FlistContent.jsp%3Fcourse_id%3D_108110_1%26content_id%3D_5232448_1

Skovholt, Karianne, Anette Grønning and Anne Kankaanranta. 2014. “The Communicative Functions of Emoticons in Workplace E-Mails: :-).” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Published online before print. January 10, 2014. doi: 10.1111/jcc4.12063

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When it comes to fandom, it pays to appease the masses.

With new technology comes the inevitable cries of the unconvinced and the untrusting; certain of an impending doom that follows any advances in processes or straying from tradition. The advent of the printing press brought with it derision from the elite, claims that by allowing the masses increased access to information, and an increased ability to print information, language and storytelling would become a lost art to the bourgeoisie. Likewise, the coming of Web 2.0 and a more communicatory form of the internet leaves many still unconvinced that any control is truly in their hands.  

Concepts of crowdsourcing and crowd labour bring with them accusations of exploitation aimed at large corporations believed to be taking advantage of the people under the guise of participating in an open forum (Sauter, 2014).

However, there are examples from the entertainment industry that must make the naysayers think twice about such accusations. Examples where the public is not only given a voice, but where this voice is heard and used to develop large-scale projects.

A popular example that includes what Flynn (2001, cited in Shefrin 2004, 274) describes as the “inclusionary vibe” is that of the production of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy, where Jackson fed off suggestions and feedback from long-time fans of the series in nearly all stages of production. As history will show, the movie trilogy was extremely successful, both in regards to the box office and with fans of the original fantasy novels.

However, an even more impressive example exists, where fans’ input and feedback was not used in the creation of a highly popular entertainment product, but the alteration of the finished piece itself, providing them with the product they most truly desired.

In 2012, the popular action sci-fi video game Mass Effect 3 launched on PCs and gaming consoles with a conclusion to the franchise that not only disappointed and angered its fans, but led them to demand a remake of the ending. The dominant complaint regarding the game’s ending was that it “disregards the player's choices on both galactic and personal scales” (Clarkson 2012). This, in a game series that relied so heavily on the player’s choices determining the game outcomes, was sure to provoke a retaliatory response from it’s core followers.   

The publisher of the series, Bioware, though genuinely surprised at the fans’ reactions eventually released downloadable content (DLC) for the game that would take gamers deeper into the story, and reveal more to the ending than was originally offered (Shaw 2012).

This example illustrates the importance of not only providing Flynn’s “Inclusionary vibe” when producing popular content, but that content producers must fully buy into the concept of participatory fandom, which stresses the importance of new media respecting fan cultures (Jenkins 1992). Because Mass Effect 3 was the third game in the Mass Effect series, its players had already built up a relationship with the game, its characters, and its story, thus having a heavily vested interest in it’s ending. By listening to the game’s fans and respecting their feedback enough to take on board, Bioware were able to deliver a product that their supporters felt they had worked towards and deserved.

References

Clarkson, Sparky. 2012. “Mass Effect 3's Ending Disrespects Its Most Invested Players.” Accessed April 6, 2014. http://kotaku.com/5898743/mass-effect-3s-ending-disrespects-its-most-invested-players/all

Jenkins, Henry. 1992. “Textual poachers: Television fans and participatory culture”. New York: Routledge, Chapman, and Hall.

Sauter, Theresa. 2014. “Week 4 Lecture PowerPoint slides – New Media Enterprises”. Accessed March 19, 2014. http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_4_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fcontent%2FlistContent.jsp%3Fcourse_id%3D_108110_1%26content_id%3D_5232446_1.

Shaw, Patrick. 2012. “BioWare: New Mass Effect 3 Content Will ‘Directly Address’ Feedback.” Accessed April 6, 2014. http://www.wired.com/2012/03/mass-effect-3-new-ending/.

Shefrin, Elana. 2004. “Lord of the Rings, Star Wars, and Participatory Fandom: Mapping New Congruencies Between the Internet and Media Entertainment Culture.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (3): 261-281.

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Exploi-Playtion

Concepts such as online crowdsourcing and Gamification are the buzzwords of new media entrepreneurship. With some simple yet effective marketing, companies are able to outsource their labour to individuals who may be working on a pittance or for nothing, purely because they may not be aware that they are actually performing work, but instead think they are innocently playing a game.

Jenkins (Quoted in Fuchs 2013, 13) describes how new technologies and new media are allowing web 2.0 to be more participatory, in that consumers are able to participate in the creation of products and services, a process that many believe has lead to the democratization of the internet, and a “new economic democracy” (Howe 2008 quoted in Fuchs 2013, 14).

But are consumers really on equal terms with producers, or are they being duped and unwittingly not only providing input for products but the labour needed to actually make them, and widening the divide between producers and consumers?

Gamification refers to the design of hardware and software in non-game contexts using design elements from games (Deterding, Dixon, Khaled & Nacke 2011, 9), and has been used by companies online for years now in order to improve their products and services without the need to pay skilled labour. Examples range from the innocent such as Google’s homepage icon acting as a mini Pac-Man video game on the game’s anniversary, to the less innocent, which has seen citizens help identify protestors to the government by comparing CC-TV footage to individual’s photos (Zittrain, 2009).

The theory that many hold, that social media may be a bastion free of a corporate stronghold, where ads are largely ignored is also seeming less and less true.  Online games that require the user to sign in and either reveal certain information to play the game, or promote the game to a certain amount of friends act as free advertising for and data mines for corporations.

The mobile game, Ingress, required players to travel to certain destinations and incorporates a light virtual-reality aspect. But it’s possible that by players performing the necessary tasks to succeed in the game, they are providing the game’s producers with information about how those players live their lives, including how they may use transportation or their social habits.

Alternatively, games exist where the sole purpose is to create content for the producers, whether by taking photos of landmarks, or providing functions only humans can perform to help better artificial intelligence, such as Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk (Sauter, 2014).

There are many different types of crowdsourcing, but each one raises the issue of ethics, and whether or not these contributors are being exploited for their labour, especially when there are times when it may not be clear who they are “working” for.

The nagging question in such circumstances is whether it is ethical and acceptable for companies to hide their info-gathering and content-sourcing in the guise of games, justifying their ends by the means of providing “free” entertainment. Or, is it purely a form of exploitation of the consumers, who may be too trusting and are unwillingly offering their services for free to those who could be spending money on wages to those who need it?

References

Deterding, S., Dixon, D., Khaled, R., and Nacke, L. 2011.From game design elements to gamefulness: defining "gamification". ACM Press.

Fuchs, Christian. 2013. Social Media: A critical introduction. London, UK: Sage Publications.

Sauter, Theresa. 2014. “Week 4 Lecture PowerPoint slides – New Media Enterprises”. Accessed March 19, 2014. http://blackboard.qut.edu.au/webapps/portal/frameset.jsp?tab_tab_group_id=_4_1&url=%2Fwebapps%2Fblackboard%2Fcontent%2FlistContent.jsp%3Fcourse_id%3D_108110_1%26content_id%3D_5232446_1

Zittrain, Jonathan. 2009. “Minds for Sale”. Video posted 16 November. Accessed March 19, 2014. http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2009/11/berkwest