A topic that is covered in many of our mass communication classes as well as on this blog is the growth in the use of “second screens,” where a TV audience member uses more than screen at once. (An example would be watching television and following Twitter posts on a smartphone or tablet at the same time.) A recent study published the Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media considers some of the implications of television producers’ attempts to address this phenomenon.
TV producers and networks – bowing to the fact that they’re unlikely to be able to get us to put down those oh-so-addictive devices – are seeking to use them to their own benefit. Increasingly, they’re trying to encourage online conversation about their programs in order to enhance viewer engagement and, in some cases, drive people back to the broadcast itself by making it more of an “event.” (Just about the only thing that made Sy-Fi’s Sharknado movies entertaining, for example, was the all the snark about the sharks that accompanied them on social media. The movies themselves are gleefully awful. So part of what encouraged people to watch was the opportunity to be a part of the conversation.) One obvious and common way of seeking to harness the power of social media is to promote hashtags associated with the series that allow viewers to follow the conversation and encourage them to take part. Another method is integrating content from social media directly into the broadcast. A variety of programs from the TODAY show to Project Runway have tried broadcasting selected public Tweets along with the program either in the form of a crawl along the bottom of the screen or a series of pop-ups.
A recent study by Jaclyn Cameron and Nick Geidner that was published in the September Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media reports on a pair of experiments designed to investigate how this sort of “supplemental” material might affect our evaluation of the content of the program itself. They argue that social media can function as an informal gauge of public opinion. This suggests that it has the potential to contribute to conformity effects. That is, audience members might tend to adjust (consciously or unconsciously) their own opinions to be consistent with what they see as the dominant public opinion.
In one experiment, participants watched two different political videos (one was a speech delivered from the Senate floor, the other taped message in which the politician addressed the camera directly and explained her stance on a political issue). There were three versions of each video – one with no social media content, one with a Twitter feed crawling along the bottom of the feed containing primarily positive tweets, and a third with a feed that contained primarily negative tweets. After each video, the participants were asked questions about the videos, including their evaluation of the politicians’ performances and whether they were convinced by their arguments. They found that those who saw the versions with the positive tweets tended to rate the politicians’ more highly than those who saw the versions with the negative ones. When they looked at whether the participants indicated they were convinced themselves, the effects were less consistent – they found conformity effects with one video, but not the other.
They also looked at this in the context of audiences’ ratings of performers on American Idol. Guess what? There were conformity effects there as well.
How do you think that the views of others that you see on social media affect your own opinions of what you see?
(If you’re a registered student at UM-St. Louis and are interested in the article, you have access to the entire text through the University library’s online databases.)
