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Directions
In this activity, you will work on the second part of the critical analysis of your technology’s role in your event. You should consider the feedback from your instructor on the previous activity and use your responses to inform this assignment. Throughout the process, you will support your analysis with reliable evidence from varied sources, which will include two resources from the Module Resources sections of this course and two resources that you find through your own research using the Shapiro Library. For this activity, you will recommend strategies for how to address the limitations of technology and assess significant factors that could impact understanding the role of technology in this event. You will assess the benefits and challenges of critically analyzing technology in society. Finally, you will recommend strategies for using this kind of critical analysis for meeting your personal goals.
Specifically, you must address the following rubric criteria:
Integrate reliable evidence from varied sources throughout your paper to support your analysis.
It is important to draw from a diverse pool of perspectives from varied sources to support the analysis. This is different from the Citations and Attributions rubric criterion.
You will be evaluated on both criteria.
Recommend strategies to address the limitations of the technology involved in the event.
What may be the positive impact of critically analyzing technology in general? What are the more difficult aspects of addressing technology?
Recommend strategies for using this kind of critical analysis for meeting your personal goals.
SAGE Reference
The SAGE Handbook of Social Media
Author: Rhiannon Bury
Pub. Date: 2017
Product: SAGE Reference
DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781473984066
Keywords: television, fans, screens, screening, audiences, social media
Disciplines: Social Media, Media Studies, Social Media, Marketing, Media, Communication & Cultural
Studies
Access Date: January 28, 2023
Publishing Company: SAGE Publications Ltd
City: 55 City Road
Online ISBN: 9781473984066
© 2017 SAGE Publications Ltd All Rights Reserved.
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Television Viewing and Fan Practice in an Era of Multiple Screens
Rhiannon Bury
The year before Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg was born, George Lucas co-founded THX, a system
to ensure high-quality motion picture sound, first implemented in time for the 1983 release of Star Wars: Return of the Jedi. An early THX trailer included the slogan ‘The audience is listening.’ Today, thanks in part to
Zuckerberg and other so-called Web 2.0 entrepreneurs, ‘the people formally known as the audience’ (Rosen,
2006) are sharing, liking, following, tweeting, blogging, reblogging, and otherwise engaging with popular media content produced by industry and fans alike. Of course, viewers and fans have always done more than
passively consume media, but a convergence of digital technologies is playing a key role in bringing about
‘a system of multiple producers/distributors/consumers, an entirely new configuration of communication relations in which the boundaries between those terms collapse’ (Poster, 1995: 3). At its broadest, this chapter
critically examines the ways in which media content sharing sites such as YouTube, peer-to-peer file sharing
networks, and social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are changing viewing and participatory
fan practices.
In addition to drawing on the small but growing body of literature that addresses how social media is used in
relation to viewing and fandom, I present relevant findings from my Television 2.0 project (henceforth referred
to as TV 2.0). While the bulk of television studies scholarship has focused on digital convergence and its implications for the television industry in the post network era (Lotz, 2009), this study was designed to explore
the ways in which patterns of reception and participation in fan culture are shifting as a result of engagement
with timeshifting, streaming and downloading technologies as well as with social media. Through the collection of survey (n671) and interview data (n72), TV 2.0 fills a gap between the larger-scale quantitative studies,
produced by audience measurement and marketing research companies such as Nielsen, government agencies such as OfCom (UK) and independent organizations such as the Pew Research Center (US), and the
smaller-scale qualitative studies produced by fan studies scholars.
I begin the chapter by interrogating the very notion of the audience, and the distinctions made between audiences and fans as well as between participatory and non-participatory fans. I then deconstruct these binaries,
instead placing viewing and online participatory practices on a continuum. Finally, I provide a detailed discussion of the ways in which platforms such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter complicate and ‘dirty’ established
fan practices associated with older internet technologies. Given the focus of my research, the reception and
participation practices discussed below are in relation to television, although much of the analysis can be ap-
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plied to engagement with other genres of popular media, such as film and music.
Method
The TV 2.0 project is a mixed methods study that is best classified as quant-QUAL (Morgan, referenced in
Hesse-Biber and Leavy, 2011); it is primarily a qualitative study with a quantitative component. Data were collected over a two-year period beginning in September 2010. Individuals and online communities with scholarly, professional and/or personal interests in television were invited via email, listservs, and social media
(Facebook and Twitter) to take the online survey questionnaire and were encouraged to share information
about and the link to the survey. Purposive and snowball sampling were chosen not only to identify a reasonably diverse population of television viewers and fans, but also to seek out potential interview participants.
SPSS software was used for statistical analysis. Of the 281 respondents who expressed interest in being interviewed by telephone or Skype, 110 confirmed their interest. The first 50 participants were selected in the
order in which they responded; purposive sampling was then used after a review of the demographic variables to select the final set of participants to ensure a diverse sample. The interviews were semi-structured
and ranged from 30 minutes to two and a half hours. All were transcribed and coded using QSR NVivo software. Participants were asked to choose a pseudonym; a few chose to use their own first names, initials, or
social media ‘handles.’
The demographic snapshot of the survey respondents is as follows: 66.3% were female, 22.3% were male
and 1.3% self-identified as non-binary. The age of the respondents ranged from 18 (the minimum age to take
part in the survey) to 75, with a mean of 34.6: 71% were under the age of 40. Respondents resided in a total
of 33 countries, dominated by the USA (40%), Canada (18%), and the UK (13%). As for the interview participants, almost three-quarters were female (n53) and two-thirds were under the age of 40. Just under half
resided in the USA, 12 in Canada, 11 in the UK, six in Europe, five in Australia/New Zealand, two in South
America (Brazil and Argentina) and one in India, Israel, and Malawi respectively.
Theorizing audiences, fans, and participatory practice
What I call the reception turn of the early 1980s in mass communications (US) and cultural studies (UK)
marked a major paradigm shift, from passive to active audience, from mindless consumer to engaged viewer
and producer of meaning. With the emergence of fan studies and new media studies, the audience began to
be displaced as an object of study in favour of participatory culture and the user/produser respectively (Bird,
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2011). In his seminal work Textual Poachers, Henry Jenkins (1992) makes the distinction between the ‘bystander’ (a term first used by Ellis (1989) to describe the television viewer in relation to the cinema viewer)
and the fan. He describes a set of collective practices, including the production of art, music, fiction and video,
which form the basis of a participatory culture. At the heart of this culture is a desire for connection and community (Jenkins, 1992). Drawing on Toffler’s notion of the prosumer, Axel Bruns coined the term produsage to
describe ‘the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement,’ citing examples of open source software development, Wikipedia, and multi-user games (Bruns,
2006: 276. Later work by Jenkins (2006) on convergence culture and that of Bruns (2008) on video sharing
and remix/mashup culture demonstrate that participatory fans are indeed some of the most active produsers.
‘Fandom is the future,’ states Jenkins (2007: 361). ‘Certainly there are still people who only watch the show,
but more and more of them are sneaking a peak at what they are saying about the show on Television without
Pity, and once you are there, why not post a few comments. It’s a slippery slope from there.’
This so-called fanification (Nikunen, 2007) of the audience has been met with criticism for overestimating the
numbers of fans involved in produsage (see Bird, 2011; Burgess, 2011). Yet counter-claims that fans make
up a minority of television audiences are also unsubstantiated. Van Dijck, for exampled, makes reference to
the ‘emerging rule of thumb’ that only one in a hundred viewers will actually produce online fan-based content ( quoted in Bird, 2011: 504). Jenkins, Ford and Green (2013: 155) have tried to address these concerns,
striving not to ‘overstate the prevalence of many active audience behaviors’. At the same time, they maintain
that even those who are ‘just’ viewing ‘do so differently in a world where they recognize their potential to contribute to broader conversations about that content’ (2013: 154–155). They cite findings from several surveys
conducted by the Pew Research Center that show that media production among teens is steadily increasing.
What seems to be taken for granted in this debate is that there is indeed an audience to be ‘fanified.’ While
numerous reception scholars have followed the lead of Ien Ang (1991, 1996) to complicate or redefine the
concept (see Abercombie and Longhurst, 1998; Fiske, 1992; Gorton, 2009; Livingstone, 2004), active audiences are as much a construct of the imaginings of others as are the passive audiences of the Nielsen Company or the Frankfurt School. They are what John Hartley calls invisible fictions:
In no case is the audience ‘real’, or external to its discursive construction. There is no ‘actual’ audience that lies beyond its production as a category, which is merely to say that audiences are only
ever encountered per se as representations. Furthermore, they are so rarely self-represented that
they are almost always absent. (Hartley, 1992: 105, italics in the original)
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It is this last point on self-representation that is key. Nation states are described by Anderson (1983) as imagined communities, their citizens invested in ‘steady, anonymous, simultaneous activity’ (Anderson, cited in
Hartley, 1992: 104). Television audience members, on the other hand, are not invested in their collective existence. John Fiske takes a similar position to Hartley in declaring that the ‘“television audience” is not a social category. … Categories focus our thinking on similarities: people watching television are best modeled
according to a multitude of differences’ (Fiske, 1989: 56). Livingstone and Das (2013) echo Ang’s position
that the ‘thingness’ associated with the concept of audience is misleading. They argue that the audience is ‘a
noun that merely stands in as shorthand for the verbs that account for the textually/technologically mediated
communicative processes that connect people’ (Livingstone and Das, 2013: 111). I am arguing, however, that
the audience cannot be decoupled from its history of thingness and that its use is overdetermined. Hence, the
audience is always a mass audience, a fiction that is always in the process of being made ‘real’ through its
measurement, monetization and commodification. While this process must be studied and critiqued in the era
of Big Data (see Andrejevic, 2007), concept is best dispensed with altogether and attention paid to what Fiske
(1987: 57) describes as ‘the processes of viewing, that variety of cultural activities that take place in front of
the screen,’ and, today, in front of multiple screens as well as on the screen itself. The issue of ‘fanification’
raised at the beginning of this section therefore needs to be examined in terms of the relationship between
viewing, participation and fandom.
Following Jenkins (1992), fan studies scholars, including myself (Bury, 2005), have focused on participation
in relation to community making. This focus, in conjunction with the greater visibility of participatory culture
afforded by the internet, has had the effect (even if not the intention) of not only rendering ‘non-participatory’
fans invisible, but measuring them against participatory fans and finding them lacking. In the TV 2.0 project,
I set out to break down this binary by examining a selection of established online fan practices in the context
of a continuum. On the one end are practices that involve lesser amounts of active involvement in fandom.
These include information-seeking, or reading posts made on discussion forums but not posting. In the middle
are practices such as engaging in some discussion on forums and possibly reading fan fiction or viewing fan
‘vids’ without being active members of fan communities. On the other end are interactive/interpretive practices
as well as fan production and creativity in the context of community. To this end I asked the survey respondents to define themselves as fans based on their engagement with at least one of the following practices in
the 12 months prior to taking the survey:
• Having watched the majority of episodes of at least one season of a particular series.
• Staying abreast of news about the series through traditional and new media.
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• Accessing and/or using additional web content, such as webisodes, quizzes, or games.
• Discussing the series with other fans on discussion forums or social networking sites.
• Producing creative work (e.g., fiction, art, music, and/or videos) based on at least one favourite series.
Although I do not consider viewing on its own to be a participatory fan practice (which is not to say that viewing
cannot be a social activity), I included it as part of the exclusion question to capture a minimal level of fannish
commitment; those who answered in the negative were taken to the end of the survey, skipping the section
on fan practices. Perhaps not surprisingly, 89% of the respondents identified as fans, 92% of women and
84% of men. The response to the first question in the section demonstrated that those who identified as fans
were well above the minimal one-series threshold, having watched a mean of seven television series over the
12-month period. The next question in the section established how often they visited any type of online site,
including social network sites, discussion forums, and social media platforms, in relation to the series of which
they were fans: 12% answered never, 22% occasionally, 26% sometimes, and 41% frequently. When asked
specifically about online discussion forums, 37% reported having visited at least one in the past year, but less
than half (15%) had participated in a discussion. As for fan creative practices, 25% had read fan fiction and
13% had written it and shared with others online. The gap between ‘consumption’ and ‘production’ of fan vids
is even more striking: whereas 31% had viewed at least one fan vid, only 3% had produced at least one and
shared with others online (6% were unfamiliar with fan fiction and vids, respectively).
Taken together, these findings suggest that both the proponents and the critics of fanification are correct: the
vast majority of viewers of popular television can be categorized as fans and as such their numbers have
been underestimated. On the other hand, most fans are clustered on the ‘less participatory’ end of the continuum, doing more than just viewing a favourite program or series, but not directly engaging in the hallmark
practices of participatory culture. The numbers of those clustered on the ‘most participatory’ end have therefore been overestimated. The next section will explore the ways in which content sharing platforms and social
media further complicate the participatory continuum.
Social media and the power of participatory dirt
Hartley ascribes television’s power as being ‘located in dirt,’ that is, a form of power that ‘resides in the interfaces between individuals, in ambiguous boundaries’ (Leach, cited in Hartley, 1992: 23). Television is dirty not
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only because it has traditionally challenged bourgeois aesthetics of taste (i.e., television as ‘boob tube’) but,
in recent years, with the explosion of ‘quality’ television, it also refuses to stay on its side of the low culture
boundary. I contend that its power of dirt these days also lies in the refusal of its content to remain on the television screen itself. Digital television is a boundary technology both ‘window-on-the-world and portal, flow and
database’ (Bennett, 2008: 163). Streaming and downloading technologies enable multi-screen viewing, that
is, the viewing of content on a computer, mobile device, or via a set-top box (e.g., Wii or Apple TV), connected to a television set. They also permit the widespread circulation of television and other media content by
fans through a number of platforms, such as Vimeo, YouTube, iTunes and peer-to-peer file-sharing networks
using BitTorrent clients (e.g., Pirate Bay). Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter are similarly
‘dirty’ because of the ways in which they alter established practices and enable new ones. Furthermore, the
boundary between the television viewer and new media user becomes blurred as it does between the ‘real’
spaces of viewing and cyberspaces. Below, I discuss four such dirty practices: spreada-bility, second screen,
liking and following, and creativity.
Spreadability
When undertaken by fans, the sharing of television content can be understood as a practice of spreadability
(Jenkins, Ford, and Green 2013), and its dirtiness is reinforced by an association with piracy. Despite
YouTube’s early identification with produsage, Burgess and Green (2009) found that the most ‘favorited’ and
‘viewed’ videos came from traditional media sources, most of which were almost certainly shared without
copyright permission. (Interestingly, user-created content received the most comments.) According to the web
publication TorrentFreak, Game of Thrones (HBO)was the most pirated TV show of 2016 for the fifth straight
year in a row, followed by The Walking Dead (AMC) and Westworld (HBO). (Van Der Sar, 2016). According to
Newman, ‘the existence of files of shows available for sharing is itself a token of the value of certain kinds of
television’ (2012: 466). PricewaterhouseCoopers surveyed just over 200 participants who admitted to pirating
copyrighted media content. Over 80% said that they had streamed TV shows for free in the past six months
and 61% said that they had downloaded shows for free (Bothun and Lieberman, 2011). My findings were similar. The TV 2.0 survey respondents streamed television programming more frequently than they downloaded
it: 86% had streamed television programming from a network site (e.g., HBO.com) and 82% had used a ‘thirdparty’ site such as Netflix and YouTube, compared to 63% who had downloaded content (Bury and Li, 2015).
The percentages of frequent streaming from both network and third-party sites and downloading were much
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closer: just over and just under 30% respectively. To comply with recommendations made by the Research
Ethics Board at my university, however, I did not distinguish between unauthorized streaming or downloading
activity in the questionnaire, and was careful not to ask direct questions in the interviews about the legality
of such activity. Nonetheless, a quarter of the interview participants still made direct references to streaming
entire TV programs via YouTube (as opposed to trailers or clips) or downloading them illegally with BitTorrent
clients.
Bothun and Lieberman (2011) concluded that price was a driving factor for piracy, as was the popularity of the
practice – the ‘everybody does it’ justification. Jenkins, Ford and Green, however, offer another perspective:
‘piracy is as much a consequence of the market failures of media companies to make content available in a
timely and desirable manner as it is a consequence of the moral failure of audience members’ (2013: 16).
This position is more in line with the TV 2.0 findings. Those participants who admitted or alluded to doing so
gave examples of series that were not accessible in a timely fashion on broadcast television in their region of
residence. William, for example, had already seen the numerous American series he was a fan of by the time
they were broadcast in New Zealand. The following samples capture the frustration for those outside North
America who are fans of American series:
We’ve moved out of our traditional watching live to actually torrenting it so we are up-to-date with the US in
Top Chef Masters. We couldn’t stand it anymore. The wait for it was too long. …. [The same is true of] The
Killing and Game of Thrones, neither of them are on New Zealand television. They are not even being preadvertised as going to be on New Zealand television! (Khal)
Mad Men here in Argentina got lots of news in the national newspaper and there is no way to see it other than
the internet because no one bought it and there is not AMC here but there is a pretty big crowd of fandom.
Mad Men is like an extreme case for me because it was like, I KNEW it aired on Sundays or on Mondays.
Then on Mondays I was like desperate and I woke up very early and said, ‘PLEASE, download Mad Men!!’
(Lauchita)
American viewers gave similar reasons for downloading British shows like Doctor Who, Torchwood and Sherlock before they were broadcast on BBC America (although now these series are broadcast almost simultaneously):
I guess the one that I did seek out that they didn’t show on BBC America was Sherlock. They didn’t show it for
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a while. I did go get that one pretty quickly. Being a fan of Steven Moffat’s writing I figured it would be pretty
brilliant and of course, it was pretty brilliant. (Rene)
These responses offer an explanation for the TorrentFreak numbers. Game of Thrones most likely had the
most downloads both because it airs on a speciality network, HBO, that requires a premium and therefore
more costly cable/satellite package in Canada and the USA. Fans living in other countries do not even have
the opportunity to view episodes at the time of original broadcast. Cost and timeliness are therefore interconnected factors that cannot be reduced to a desire to get something for nothing.
Heresluck is an interesting case of a ‘cord cutter’ who downloads everything she watches:
As soon as I have the DVD’s the downloads are obsolete. They are lower quality; I can’t use them for vidding
purposes very well. I mean, I can but they are a pain for various reasons. So yeah, they are obsolete as soon
as I get the DVD’s. I do typically keep them until the DVD’s come out just in case I want to re-watch before I
have the DVD’s available. (Heresluck)
While cost is the primary reason for her not having a cable subscription, by purchasing the series of which
she is a fan, she is, in her own words, an ‘ethical pirate.’
Robert and Peter Parker were both anime fans and mentioned the extra step of ‘subbing’, a practice which
involves the creation of English subtitles before an episode is uploaded to be shared with other fans. M discussed the process by which Brazilian fans made Lost spreadable for other Portuguese-speaking fans:
When Lost was still on, this is how it happened. You have that link to watch it on streaming, right? Then the
episode would air around this time here now is 10:00 p.m. or 11:00 p.m. Then this group of fans, they would
download the episode after it was aired and then they spent the whole night subtitling it. Translating and subtitling it. For me, for instance. I will wake up the next morning like 7:00 or 8:00 a.m. and the subtitle would
already be done. It was ready to download. You could download it and watch it at home. (M)
Taken together, the quotations above demonstrate that while piracy may not be the future of TV, as De Kosnik
(2010) claims, there can be no question that it is a global practice primarily driven by affective desire.
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Second Screen
A laptop, tablet or smart phone that is used to access social media platforms while simultaneously watching
television programming has come to be known as a second screen. According to the Nielsen Company
(2012), 45% of American viewers watched television content while using a tablet at least once a day. Almost
70% reported doing so several times a week. These statistics, however, do not distinguish between attentive or fannish viewing (e.g., following a Twitter hashtag related to the program being viewed) and distracted or indifferent viewing (e.g., checking and posting status updates on Facebook with the program serving
as background). A survey by the Pew Research Center found that 52% of Americans had used their smart
phone as a second screen, with 20% reporting that they checked to see what others were saying about the
program they were watching and 19% posting their own comments about the program (Smith, 2012). These
findings are supported by Wilson (2016). The majority of her participants used social media ‘as an adjunct to
television viewing when not fully immersed in a TV show’ (Wilson, 2016: 184). For example, several families
were watching the same program together but using social media unrelated to the program on their second
screens. Others were connecting with absent family members who were watching different programs or not
watching TV at all. Thus the large majority of second-screen users are connected but distracted viewers.
In 2010, faced with a marked decline in live viewing, American networks began to move beyond simply using
Facebook and Twitter accounts to promote their popular series and entertainment events, to offering their audiences second-screen or two-screen experiences through three types of ‘attractors’: third-party apps, companion content on their websites, and the use of established social media platforms (Castillo, 2013). The first
group includes apps such as Get Glue and Zeebox that let users ‘check in’ to shows, get stickers, and interact with other fans. These apps proved unsuccessful: Get Glue was sold, renamed as tvtag and finally shut
down in January 2015; Zeebox was ‘rebranded’ to focus on celebrity news in April 2014 (Dreier, 2014). Companion content is a form of ancillary content provided by the networks that are designed to sync with viewing
on the primary screen. AMC’s Story Sync is one example, offering a series of quiz questions in relation to
the scenes on the primary screen in combination with flashbacks to related scenes from previous episodes
and promotional ties to other series. It debuted in 2012 with the second season of The Walking Dead and,
according to the network’s Senior VP Digital Media, use has grown steadily (Bishop, 2014), making it not only
successful enough to use in the current sixth season of the series, but also to be developed for other popular
series, such as Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul. These interactive apps and ancillary content, argue Lee
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and Andrejevic, ‘play an important role in reaggregating audiences when programs air in real time and in generating “big data” alongside live and social entertainment’ (2014: 43, emphasis mine). Wilson conducted the
only qualitative study to date on fan engagement with these types of apps or companion content. She found
that they have the potential to enhance viewing pleasure, particularly ‘when they are already part of an existing social [viewing] situation’ (Wilson, 2016: 187). Likely because the TV 2.0 data collection took place in the
early days of companion content development, only Khal mentioned using the ‘check in’ app Miso, which shut
down in September 2014. Kim mentioned entering an online contest during Season 2 of The Walking Dead
to win a walk-on zombie role by entering a code shown on the screen during the original broadcast. Similar to
Wilson’s participants, both Khal and Kim were watching with their spouses and described the use of the app
and entering the contest as a fun, social experience.
The juggernaut of the second screen is Twitter. As Highfield, Harrington and Bruns (2013) point out, Twitter
is made up of two distinct but overlapping networks: those based on follower–followee networks and those
based on hashtags. The practice of ‘live tweeting’ a broadcast of a program or event using hashtags can be
traced at least as far back as the Obama–Clinton debate in February 2008 (Pure Visibility, 2008), which was
within months of the first reported use of the hashtag in July 2007 (Kirkpatrick, 2011). A study of trending topics in November 2009 indicated that the largest percentage (27%) was related to entertainment (Hargittal and
Litt, 2011). Deller (2011) observed that more than 50% of the trending topics in the UK in the evening were
related to television programs being aired. Page (2012) also found that the hashtags that appeared most frequently in her corpus of tweets from June 2010 were related to sports, politics and television shows. According to Nielsen, 36 million unique US users tweeted about television in 2013 (Nielsen Company, 2014), enough
to catch the Company’s attention and form a partnership with Twitter. In October 2013, Nielsen Twitter TV
Ratings launched, which measures ‘not only “authors” – the number of people tweeting about TV programs
– but also the much larger “audience” of people who actually view those Tweets’ (Nielsen Company, 2013).
It now claims to measure gender and age demographics (how its algorithm could accurately capture such
information is another story) and publishes ‘Daily Top Five’ and ‘Weekly Top Ten’ lists of the most-tweeted
telecasts on its Nielsen Social blog, and well as a report at the end of each television season. For their part,
the broadcasting networks regularly promote the use of the ‘official’ hashtag for a particular series or event. It
would seem that the reaggregation of the audience has come full circle.
Highfield, Harrington and Bruns (2013) describe the practice of live tweeting television series and events with
hashtags, official or fan-created, as engendering ‘distributed public conversations’ that ‘come to act as a kind
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of virtual loungeroom … where audience members can come together to discuss and debate in real-time,
their responses to what they are watching’ (2013: 317). Yet their findings, from a large data set of tweets collected during the airing of the 2012 edition of the Eurovision Song Contest, do not support this claim. Although
their close analyses of some of the national clusters suggests ironic and political content, they did not attempt
to distinguish between commentary and conversation.
Drawing on Bourdieu’s notion of a linguistic marketplace, Page (2012) offers a more nuanced understanding
of live tweeting as a participatory practice: ‘Hashtags are a crucial currency which enables visibility and projects potential interaction with other members’ (2012: 184). She suggests that what appears to be conversational may in fact be ‘para-social simulations of conversationality found in broadcast talk’ (2012: 184), in other
words, people talking at each other rather than to each other. Her analysis of the Twitter data she collected
showed that the ‘one-to-many’ update type of tweet was more popular than the ‘addressed’ tweet in which
the @ symbol is used. For example, the subset of tweets that used #leadersdebate (2010 UK election) had
10 times more ‘one to many’ tweets than @ replies. That said, this does not preclude viewers who live tweet
or read the tweets using the hashtag from feeling that they are part of a larger interpretive community or participatory culture. Zappavigna (cited in Page, 2012: 184) refers to this as ambient affiliation. Similarly, Wohn
and Na (2011) analyzed over 1,000 tweets made during an October 2009 broadcast of So You Think You
Can Dance. They mapped tweet patterns onto the content of the show, noting spikes in emotion, attention
and opinion messages during commercial breaks, and when one of the dancers was injured. The rest of the
program was dominated by informational tweets. Similar to Page (2012), they found very little interactivity,
noting that less than 4% of the tweets directed at a specific user using the @ symbol were reciprocated. By
using hashtags and retweeting, however, they suggest, as Page does, that these viewers are signaling their
interest in being ‘part of a larger group’ (2012: 10).
Just over one-third of the TV 2.0 survey respondents, and nearly two-thirds of the participants interviewed,
used Twitter to follow fan-related feeds or tweet as a fan. About one-third (n=14) of the latter engaged in the
practice of live tweeting and/or followed television-related hashtags during a broadcast:
I know there was quite a few weeks ago when Supernatural did their Super Uber Meta episode, as they billed
it. So there was a ton of live tweeting of that one because everyone was just so excited and wanted to, I don’t
know – disseminate as much as possible and as quickly as possible and that seemed to be the way to do it. I
don’t remember the hashtag they used but it was trending pretty quickly and pretty high. (Rene)
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If you follow a hashtag on Twitter, like there is, I mean, I have been part of global ‘oh, come on’s’!! Where
literally there are people and I have no idea who they are. They live in Montana, that’s awesome. And we are
collectively going, ‘Tony DiNozzo [NCIS] would never do that!!!’ … I am not sure that I would have a satisfying
TV experience if I couldn’t immediately keyboard smash at people and go, ‘Oh, God! How is this going to
work?!’ Or, ‘That was brilliant!!’ or ‘That was terrible!’ (Knitmeapony)
The above data samples capture the enthusiasm and excitement of ambient affiliation. Suzie made explicit
the pleasures of this affiliation in relation to shows that she watched at home alone:
I think there is this urge that we have in all of us to experience something together and so whether you call
somebody on the phone or you go online with other people. Like my husband and son, they watch Amazing
Race and Survivor but they don’t watch the Real Housewives and when I watch The Bachelor they say, ‘what
is that?’ … I think it’s really nice that you can find a community of people who care about the show and talk
about the show and they are just at your fingertips. (Suzie)
Not everyone, however, desires a shared viewing experience. Aimee told me that live tweeting held no appeal
to her: ‘I would rather focus on the storyline that’s happening in front of me.’ Farah was not interested in live
tweeting because she was not interested in the opinions or reactions of others: ‘I tend to just watch it and think
what I want to think about it.’ Heresluck was interested in the responses of others but not their live tweets:
I mean I know that there are people who really enjoy things like say live tweeting a show while they are
watching it and seeing all the tweets that other people are posting about Supernatural or whatever. I kind of
don’t care about that at all. I am much more interested in seeing someone’s post about it a day or two later
when they’ve had a chance to organize their thoughts and produce something sort of interesting and in-depth.
That’s my priority. (Heresluck)
Live tweeting is also problematic for those unwilling or unable to watch programming live:
I frequently have to turn my Twitter off for 12 hours or 24 hours at a time during Idol season or Survivor season
because there is going to be discussion all over Twitter. I am going to be spoiled if I leave it on. And the same
obviously, goes by extension to various other shows even non-competitive reality shows, you know. I had to
be very careful while Lost was airing because inevitably people want to discuss it and it’s going to be at least
a couple of days before I am able to get the content and view it. (William)
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This last set of quotes gestures to the unevenness of this practice and the varying conditions under which fans
make meanings and pleasures from televisual texts as well as the differing levels of investment in a shared
viewing experience. There can be no question that the second screen functions to blur the boundary between
viewing and participation, whether through the use of a third-party app, ancillary web content, or social media
platforms.
Liking and Following
Almost half the TV 2.0 respondents reported having liked a series on Facebook, making it the most popular
practice included in the survey.
Among those interview participants who used Facebook and/or Twitter as fans, there were variations in engaging in the practice. Some, like Sophie, liked or followed all the shows that they watched, while others were
more selective. ‘It depends on the hotness of the actor!’ Bunny exclaimed. ‘Usually just the ones that I really
really super like. I have to really be into them to try to follow their feeds or anything like that.’
Liking or following also provides information about a favourite series and its showrunners, actors, and so
on. Such information has always been important to fans. Fiske (1989) argues that secondary texts, including
promotional material, professional and amateur criticism, insider information and ‘biographical gossip’ serve
to extend the meanings and pleasures of the primary television texts. Facebook and Twitter’s customized
newsfeeds, however, are ‘push oriented,’ serving to change ‘pull-oriented,’ browser-based information-seeking practices into information receiving and aggregation:
I get a lot of my fan news now from Facebook. So I follow all the shows that I like and a number of fan sites.
So a fair chunk of my Facebook feed is either first order or second order fannish stuff. (Revan)
Twitter and Facebook are nice for immediate information about the stars themselves and I appreciate the TV
stars. (Mary)
[Twitter] is more instantaneous. … I have got news sites on there but I have also got fandom people on there
and you see a lot of useful links and news come by. (Vera)
There are a couple of news ones that I follow that have EVERY single thing that Adam Lambert or Kris Allen
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[American Idol] does. They will have a link to it or tweet about it. So I follow, like I get a lot of fandom information that way. (Anne, 164)
The appeal of Facebook and Twitter thus lies in the immediacy and extensiveness of the information afforded
by the customized newsfeed.
The practice of liking and following is more than a way to receive and aggregate information; it provides the
possibility of receiving news and information directly from showrunners, actors, and reality stars: ‘Public figures can now seemingly speak directly to their fanbase without news or management filters’ (Bennett, 2014b:
8). The research to date on this more direct relationship has been conducted primarily from the perspective
of the artist/celebrity: Marwick and boyd (2011) did a close analysis of 20 Twitter-verified accounts, including those of well-known actors and musicians such as Mariah Carey. Baym (2012, 2015) interviewed more
than 30 independent musicians to examine the complexities of their communications with their fans through
Twitter. Bennett (2014a) examined Lady Gaga’s tweets sent to her ‘little monsters,’ a term of endearment she
uses for her fans.
Several TV 2.0 participants spoke enthusiastically about following the feeds of one’s ‘objects’ of affection:
If Nathan Fillion is tweeting from the site of Castle then I am like, ‘ahhh what’s he’s doing and this is so cool!’
The guy who played Rodney McKay on Stargate is also a big Twitterer and he is hilarious. And Stephen Fry
of course. I mean, I am a Jeeves and Wooster fan all the way up to him being on Bones. Just HUGE fan of
that man. He is massive on Twitter. (Knitmeapony)
I follow Brent Spiner on Twitter and he tends to post a ton of things where fans ask questions about what he
is doing, where he is, his experiences of playing Data [Star Trek: The Next Generation]. He is very sarcastic
and very witty which is interesting. (Jayne)
I follow – oh what’s his name? Sutter, Kurt Sutter. He’s the guy that created and writes Sons of Anarchy. So
he tweets a lot about the show and what’s happening and where they are up to and so on with making the
show. He also blogs about it. He follows some of the main players so I find that really interesting to get these
kind of insights into what’s going on as they produce the show. (Khal)
These quotes offer a glimpse into the ways in which Twitter in particular serves to alter established mediated
producer–fan and actor/celebrity–fan relations and provides a new set of fannish pleasures.
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Interactivity: It’s Just a Tweet Away
With its reciprocal friending network and generous character limit, Facebook appears to be more suitable for
discussion than Twitter with its non-reciprocal follower–followee network and its (in)famous 140-character limit. Yet few of the TV 2.0 participants, whether active in fandom or not, reported using either platform to engage
in fannish discussion beyond a round or two of turn-taking. Just over 10% of the survey respondents had
posted a comment on a Facebook page dedicated to a series of which they were fans. Few of the interview
participants mentioned Facebook at all in this context.
Every once in a while on Facebook I will post an announcement saying I’m really looking forward to tonight’s
episode of Dexter and then somebody will write a comment to that. You know, say, ‘Me too. It’s one of my
favourite shows.’ So that’s one minor way that I have the social connection but I have never had a really fullon elaborate conversation. (LWR)
Another reason for the lack of fannish interactivity on Facebook is related to spoilers (Bennett, 2014b). Buffy
said that when she wanted to find out what her friends thought of an episode, she would post a comment,
‘trying to make it as oblique as possible without revealing details … and then hoping your friends will respond
in turn.’ One exception, she recalled was the finale of Lost:
Everyone [was] taking to Facebook with their outrage at how bad that last episode was or how disappointed
they were in where it went or happy. … I remember my feed turning into this string of responses to Lost.
(Buffy)
On the other hand, Nem and Tarsus were members of Facebook groups (X-Files and Star Trek respectively)
set up by fans (as opposed to official Facebook sites for series or actors).
Everybody kind of just gets to know everybody else. You are kind of, there will be times when people will just
have little jokes with each other. You get to kind of know everybody’s preferences and you will kind of go,
‘Wow! Denise, look at this photo.’ It’s usually Zachary Quinto just being FABULOUS! ‘Look at this. Isn’t he
wonderful?’ And she will go, ‘Yes, isn’t he wonderful.’ And then everybody will kind of join in. It’s just really
knowing what everybody kind of enjoys and everybody is going to find funny. (Tarsus)
Interactivity, as described above, clearly involves the kind of more extensive discussion that typically has tak-
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en place on listservs, Yahoo groups and discussion forums, and is the basis of community making (Bury,
2005). Indeed, Tarsus found out about this Facebook group from her Yahoo group.
Given Twitter’s more restrictive design limitations, it is not surprising that a number of participants referenced
its lack of suitability for interaction:
I am not anti-Twitter but I just don’t see how it is, I don’t see what it has to offer in terms of communicating
between people. I find it a very useful information service. But I don’t understand how people can use it to
communicate with each other. (Diva)
The following participants reported interacting with others while live tweeting:
We make comments and so on when we are watching the show. It turns out there are other people around
[New Zealand] that watch television the same way we do. So for instance, when Top Chef comes available
or something like that we all tend to get it around the same time and you can have a conversation about it as
you watch it. (Khal)
The BBC political debate program, Question Time…airs Thursday nights at half past ten and they have a
hashtag … I find lots of my colleagues in those tweets. So it’s a social thing as well. (Will)
Recalling the findings of Wohn and Na (2011) and Page (2012), which I cited in relation to the second-screen
practices, it is unlikely that these exchanges were extensive. The few participants who did use Twitter to interact with other fans they knew and followed described the workarounds they used to have group conversations:
I actually do a lot of my fangirling and stuff on Twitter these days. … I have a lot of friends that I am into.
Actually I talk a lot of podfic [fanfic recorded as a podcast by the author] on Twitter. I have mostly podfic people on my Twitter. We will get into like just discussions. How you have giant meta discussions all night in 140
characters. It drives me nuts but I’ve done it more than once. It gets really confusing because there are a lot
of us. (Anne)
We @ at each other and links things to each other: did you see this? That kind of thing. Part of it is of being
able to have live conversation about things that come out. New information comes out and you are able to
talk about it. I GET my information from Twitter and then I am able to retweet and point other people to it and
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talk about it in that space rather than sort of like going to email or something like that. (Karen)
Honeycutt and Herring (2009) studied the use of the @ sign as a marker of addressivity. Their sample indicates that most of the exchanges that used the strategy of addressivity took place between two people and
averaged 3–5 messages. The longest exchange in their sample was 32 messages between 10 participants,
but it was the exception. As such, it serves to illustrate both the ‘level of interactional complexity’ that Twitter
affords but also its ‘limitations as a tool for conversation and collaboration’ (Honeycutt and Herring, 2009: 8).
The possibility of communicating directly with showrunners, actors and celebrities was an exciting prospect
for participants such as Anne, who saw it as ‘the fourth wall … breaking down.’ Yet, there is little evidence of
such interactivity. Marwick and boyd (2011) note that Hollywood ‘A-list’ celebrities are either not on Twitter or,
if they are, do not or rarely engage with fans directly. Mariah Carey never replies to fans publicly but some
claim that she has sent them private direct messages (Marwick and boyd, 2011). Bennett’s (2014a) analysis
of Lady Gaga’s tweets and the survey responses from her fans give no indication that the star interacts directly with them. Only one TV 2.0 participant reported interacting with a well-known celebrity:
Never in my life did I think that I would banter with George Michael on Twitter about politics which was what I
was doing before you called! Because he is very involved in this scandal at the moment and he is just talking
his head off and everybody is talking with him. (Vera)
Thus, it is fair to say that part of Twitter’s appeal is the possibility of realizing the fantasy of interacting with
the famous. The situation is somewhat different with less famous artists, entertainment workers and content
producers. Bennett (2014b) mentions that American actor Orlando Jones regularly engages with fans. Baym
interviewed Zoë Keating, an American new classical musician, who said that her fans expect her to reply to
their tweets: ‘It’s not like “Oh my God, she actually wrote back.” It’s like “of course you wrote back”’ (Baym,
2012: 293). Of the few TV 2.0 participants who mentioned tweeting an actor or showrunner, there was no
sense that a reply was expected:
Joe Mantegna [Criminal Minds] said something about one of his movies being out and he simply tweeted, it
will be out on such and such a day and I tweeted back, ‘I have already pre-ordered mine.’ Yeah that kind of
thing. There was something about supporting veterans and I said, ‘Thank you. My father’s a veteran.’ (Mary)
Mary had the following to say to fans who expected replies: ‘Get it over it people … I don’t expect somebody
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who is starring in a television show to send me a personal reply to anything. That’s unrealistic. I appreciate
what they do.’ Libby did receive replies from showrunners Hart Hanson (Bones) and Shawn Ryan (Chicago
Code) when she asked whether viewing on TV or online affected the amount that producers and actors were
paid: ‘I admit, it was pretty exciting when they actually wrote back to me. … I got all geeked about it and I was
a little embarrassed.’ Marwick and boyd (2011) suggest that fans tweet artists or actors that they follow not to
receive a reply as much as to display an affective relationship.
To conclude, the dirty power of Facebook and Twitter is located in their potential to collapse the boundaries
between information and interactivity: rather than visiting websites for information and/or forums to read or
discuss, or even going to different sections on the same site, fans can move seamlessly from reading their
newsfeed, liking or favoriting fan-related information to commenting or tweeting. They can also not only get
information straight from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, but engage the horse directly. Yet there are architectural limitations that constrain more extended interactions between and among fans as well as unequal
relations of power that continue to constrain direct engagement between fans and the ‘objects’ of their affection.
Creativity
Fans have been collaborating on and sharing creative works online since the early days of the internet via
a combination of archives (e.g., fanfiction.net, Organization for Transformative Works’ Archive of Our Own),
listservs, Yahoo groups and Livejournal (Coppa, 2006). Such production reworks narratives, characterizations and relationships that are protected by intellectual property laws. As such, the unauthorized use of such
content to create fan fiction and fan vids was already a dirty practice, as acknowledged by Jenkins (1992)
through his deployment of De Certeau’s concept of poaching. In the Web 2.0 era, Jenkins, Ford and Green
(2013) argue that the spread of content is in itself integral to its remaking I contend, however, that fan fiction
and vids are a part of a second-order of spreadability that alters the gift economy upon which fan production
and sharing has been based. According to Booth (2010: 134), readers of fan fiction and viewers of fan vids
are not expected to reciprocate in kind: ‘what the gift in the digital age requires for “membership” into the fan
community, is merely the obligation to reply.’ This reply could take the form of a positive comment or piece of
constructive criticism (Jenkins, Ford, and Green, 2013).
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The operation of what Booth (2010) refers to as digi-gratis, however, is dependent on scale and restricted
access to members of the creative communities. Second-order spreadability is enabled by sites like YouTube.
As a result, ‘fan producers are no more able to control the dissemination of their texts than corporate producers’ (Russo, 2009: 127). According to Freda, an acafan who does research on vidding, there is ‘a tension
in the community [as to] whether vidding can exist outside of LiveJournal.’ She admitted to being ‘a bit of a
snob’: ‘A lot of times if I see a vid and I don’t know the vidder or, and this sounds really embarrassing, or if the
vid is on YouTube I won’t watch it.’ In contrast, Anne was comfortable posting her vids to YouTube, although
she also noted ‘snobbery’ around doing so:There are YouTube communities from what I have seen but there’s also sometimes some snobbery involved
where it’s like if you post a YouTube you are not as good. Kind of like with fic and archives. A lot of people,
especially on LiveJournal will be like, ‘Well, I don’t like going to archives. I would never post my fic to archives
because archives have so much bad fic.’ (Anne)
These comments highlight a longstanding concern about quality among those I have described elsewhere
as ‘elite’ fans (Bury, 2005, 2008). From the expansion of the internet to include the AOL (America OnLine)
bulletin boards in the early 1990s, elite fans have expressed concerned about a decline in standards of interpretation and creativity due to the participation of ‘the masses,’ who are seen as lacking the levels of cultural
and linguistic capital needed to produce or engage with ‘quality’ works. Platforms like YouTube short-circuit
the gift economy, the implicit value of which is founded on what Bourdieu (1993) calls bourgeois aesthetics.
Outside the boundaries of fan communities, there is no guarantee of a ‘quality’ reply or feedback.
One positive effect of spreadability on this scale is that it affords the opportunity for ‘view-only’ fans as well as
those fans on the ‘less participatory’ end of the continuumto become familiar with fan creativity.
Every now and then a friend of mine will post something on Facebook, for example, a fan vid but they don’t
know it’s a fan vid. They don’t know what it is; they don’t know about fandom. It’s like, ‘I found this cool video.
It’s got House in it’ or whatever is going on that day. At which point I usually have to educate them as to what
it is they’ve found. Oh, look, you found a fan vid. This is what a fan vid does. (Rene)
Rene also engaged in second-order spreadability by posting the occasional fan vid to Facebook ‘if I think it’s
a really good one.’ Gene knew little about participatory fandom beyond a class he took in cultural studies.
When he was asked to review a manuscript submitted to a scholarly journal analyzing fan-made reedits using
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scenes of a gay couple from Verbotene Liebe (Forbidden Love), a German soap with English subtitles, he
went to view them on the YouTube channel where they were posted. When he found himself on extended
bedrest, he went back to YouTube and watched all the original episodes of the soap and actively searched
for other fan works not only featuring the couple, but other queer storylines from international and American
series.
It was all foreign to what I do [as a communications scholar]. … So it’s been really exciting for me because
it’s the experience of being a fan, which I’ve never been or really understood. I mean, my earlier partner was
a soap opera watcher and I would leave the room. I just couldn’t stand the sound of it. (Gene)
Although Gene never became actively involved in fandom, and by extension the gift economy, the spread of
creative fan works beyond the boundaries of fan communities made it possible for him and many other fans
to value and take pleasure in these texts.
Beyond spreadability, there are a few creative practices worth noting that are specific to Twitter. The first is
‘twitfic’, mentioned by several TV 2.0 participants. As one might imagine, it is a very abbreviated work of fiction spread over a number of tweets. Anne’s response pointed to the limitations of Twitter for such a practice:
‘there is this one fic that I am constantly directed to that I like just can’t work up the energy to read because
it’s in like 200 Twitter posts.’ The other is the form of Twitter role-play that involves the creation of accounts for
TV characters by fans (Bennett, 2014b). Jenkins, Ford and Green (2013) recount the reaction of AMC when
Don Draper ‘appeared’ on Twitter, followed by the other main and supporting Mad Men characters, including
the Xerox machine. After suspending the accounts as a violation of copyright, the network eventually heeded
the advice of their marketing agency and relented. Wood and Baughman (2012) studied the tweets from 10
‘character’ accounts and their interactions with each other. They found that much of the tweeting was live and
both supplemented the episode narratives as well as provided alternative narratives. Other fans who followed
the character accounts would also get involved in the role-play at times, for example, taking on the role of a
minor character but using their own account. While no TV 2.0 participants engaged in this creative practice,
several mentioned following character accounts (Aimee), and reading character exchanges in relation to a
series (Robert).
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Conclusion
While communication relations between producers and consumers have yet to be entirely reconfigured as
envisioned over 20 years ago by Poster (1995), Web 2.0 technologies have dirtied and disturbed the hierarchical binary relationship. As I have demonstrated, streaming and downloading protocols in combination with
content sharing and social media platforms have blurred the boundaries between the television screen and
mobile screens, viewing and participation, information and interactivity, and creativity and community. Much
like the printing press in the fifteenth century, which increased the flow of communication and raised the likelihood that more people would have access to copies of printed materials (Graff, 1991), content sharing and
social media platforms spread industry-produced content and fan creative works, increasing the opportunities
for fans along the full range of the participatory continuum to find, view and engage with such content through
legal and illegal means across national borders. While internet technologies made participatory culture more
visible with the creation of fan-dedicated listservs, websites and discussion forums, Web 2.0 technologies
make ‘less participatory’ fans more visible by enabling them to like, follow, post, and tweet without necessarily
becoming active in fandom or, pace Jenkins (2007), even desiring to do so. When I asked the TV 2.0 participants on the ‘less participatory’ end of the continuum if they could see themselves becoming involved in
online fan communities, writing a piece of fanfic, or creating a vid, few expressed interest in doing so. (Only
those who were media scholars tried to rationalize why they were not actively involved in fandom.)
In placing the practices discussed above in the broader context of media reception and technology use, it is
important to keep in mind that most people still predominately watch broadcast television. According to TV
2.0 survey results, only those respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 and those residing in continental
Europe viewed as much programming online as they did on a television set (Bury and Li, 2015). As for social
media use, according to the Pew Research Center, while 71% of US adult internet users are on Facebook,
not even one quarter (23%) are on Twitter, less than on Pinterest (28 %) and Instagram (26%) (Duggan et al.,
2015). The use of a second screen in relation to fannish engagment is therefore a marginal practice at best,
the majority of the millions of tweets during live broadcast sent by a minority of the total viewing audience.
Third-party apps and ancillary content were designed by the industry to encourage ‘stickiness’ (Jenkins, Ford
and Green, 2013) and shore up the most traditional viewing practice of all – live viewing.
Moreover, as the TV 2.0 findings indicate, fans continue to use older platforms to find information, to interact
with one another, and to share creative works. While social media platforms afford unique pleasures in terms
of information aggregation and the possibility of direct communication with writers, showrunners, actors, and
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reality stars, the same is not true of interactivity. As I argue elsewhere, the in-depth, regular, sustained interaction enabled by older technologies ranging from listservs to LiveJournal, upon which community making in
fandom was founded, casts the limitations of Facebook and Twitter into sharp relief (Bury, 2016).
Finally, this chapter does not capture the full range of participatory practices involving the use of social media.
The reblogging platform Tumblr, for example, is popular among some fans. Bennett (2014b) notes its use for
visual creativity, a claim supported by the TV 2.0 data. Participant opinions as to its usefulness for interaction were mixed as they were for Twitter. There are also several other established fan practices outside the
scope of TV 2.0 project that now have a social media component: cosplay (dressing in character costume
at conventions) (see Lamerichs, 2015) and fan activism (see Bennett, 2014a, 2014b). I also want to flag the
emerging practice of crowdfunding or fan-ancing to quote Scott (2015). Fan-ancing relies on platforms such
as Kickstarter to help finance not only independent creative projects, but those of creators of commercial
film and television but which lack full industry backing (e.g., Veronica Mars) (see Bennett, Chin and Jones,
2015).Taken together, content sharing and social media platforms have not replaced or displaced older platforms, or transformed participatory practices and participatory culture, as much as they have supplemented
and extended them.
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• television
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• audiences
• social media
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1
3-2 Activity: Critical Analysis
Fatima Zohra Benkhouaja
SNHU
IDS 403
01/22/2022
2
Technology through interdisciplinary lenses
Social media usage skyrocketed during the covid-19 pandemic as people were restrained
in their homes. This technology is interwoven with other disciplines, including communication,
policy and governance, social science, transport, and education. Since social media relies on the
internet, the recent trends on the internet have affected its usage. Recently, the world has witnessed
an explosion of the internet, with innovations emerging every day (Warf, 2018). Today, the
internet is associated with the change in how people socialize and interact. The pandemic
accelerated this internet revolution as social interactions shifted from physical to online
interactions (Wong et al., 2021). Transportation and education disciplines were also affected
during the pandemic as most governments restricted movement to curb the spread of coronavirus.
Impact on various institutions
From the general education interdisciplinary lenses, the impact of social media on various
institutions can be examined through the lens of the social sciences. This lens focuses on the social
relationships between people. The pandemic affected how people interact as it limited physical
interactions, but social media technology helped people interact more online. Therefore, increased
social media usage during the pandemic impacted other institutions like education, family, and
community. Physical learning was halted during the pandemic. However, social media technology
ensured that education continued through online platforms (Pratama et al., 2020). Family and
community interactions were affected because the pandemic separated some families. They could
only interact on social media. Physical interactions in the community were also interrupted, and
some community members suffered from psychological distress. However, social media
technology helped families and communities interact despite the physical restrictions.
3
Social practices
Social media have also shaped social practices during the pandemic. Communication
increased during the pandemic due to the presence of social media technology. Since people were
locked up in their homes, they had more time to communicate with others through social media.
Additionally, the cultural expression grew as people interacted more through social media. People
could exchange their culture and express themselves to people from other cultures using social
media. Transportation in the 21st century has also been transformed by building highways,
spaceships, and supersonic jets (Sultana, 2014). These transport routes facilitated social
interactions. However, they were not useful during the pandemic because the movement was
restricted. Not even social media technology could facilitate physical transportation during the
pandemic, but it facilitated virtual interactions.
Technology limitations
Technology has its limitations that often involve negative impacts on the users. Social
media had negative implications during the pandemic. Social media was used to create panic and
spread misinformation during the pandemic. Consequently, it became challenging to inform people
about the pandemic and contain it before it spread. Social media technology would have been
helpful during the pandemic if it had been effectively regulated. Effective regulation would have
changed social media into a source of truth and reliable information during the pandemic.
References
4
Pratama, H., Azman, M. N. A., Kassymova, G. K., & Duisenbayeva, S. S. (2020). The Trend in
using online meeting applications for learning during the period of COVID-19 pandemic:
A literature review. Journal of Innovation in Educational and Cultural Research, 1(2), 5868.
Sultana, S. (2014). Encyclopedia of Transportation: Social Science and Policy. Sage.
Warf, B. (Ed.). (2018). The SAGE Encyclopedia of the Internet. Sage.
Wong, A., Ho, S., Olusanya, O., Antonini, M. V., & Lyness, D. (2021). The use of social media
and online communications in times of COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of the Intensive Care
Society, 22(3), 255-260.
