Television Audiences and Social Media Paper Example

Introduction

In the current society, people are more engaged in the internet world to the extent of using social media platforms to obtain and view television programs. Most of the articles on social media and television audiences, emphasizes the rate at which people are currently engaging in social media use in their daily activities, including communications, running a business and watching television programs. This literature review provides a background on the emergence of social media and how it has taken over the interest of television audiences, its impacts on social culture and perceptions towards social media users; it also provides previous an overview on previous research works and assumptions made.

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Background

According to van Dijck and Poell (2015), in the past years, social media has progressively seen the infiltration of all sectors of daily living - from friendships to political debates - and has also affected the walls of social platforms -such as journalism and law enforcement. Particularly in sectors such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, has had an impact on the social role of television and its culture, as well as disrupting journalist's distribution logistics and conventional productions. Van Dijck and Poell (2015) investigate the impact of social media growth on broadcasting corporations in Europe by exploring the encounter of public and social experiences on content, professional practices, and institution levels. Institutionally, public broadcasting platforms developed with the aim of entertaining, informing and educating different audiences as well as involving them in communal discussions. Inescapably, the combination of public television and social media made the BBC come up with decisions on how their production standards would extend to online platforms (van Dijck & Poell 2015, p. 2). The growth of social media has transformed broadcasting. Audiences have been permitted to take part in social media platforms thus distorting the boundary between news distributors and consumers. Through this, internet users are in a position to make modifications to their social news experiences to comprehend events around the globe and at the same time upholding a wish for consistent information and excellent broadcasting.

Previous Researches

Pynta et al. (2014) presented a study gauging interactivity in social television by applying a neuroscience-based approach. Their findings state that long-term memory engagement and encoding are brain processes with links to one another. When one reflects the complete quantity of perceptions, experiences, and information shown to a person daily, it is evident that a slight bit of events is fixed into the long-term memory. The authors contend that one of the basic aspects which might facilitate the strength of the encoding procedures are the experiences which seem to be of extra relevance to the viewer (Pynta et al. 2014, p. 74). Guo and Chan (2015) also carried out a study on social television audience. Three groups of aspects; traits of the viewers, characteristics of social media, and insights connected to television films, were projected to forecast the experiences of social engagement. The researchers experimented on ten viewer motivations for using social media in accessing television programs.

Assumptions

Concerning television advertisements, higher states of memory programming show that the messages of the adverts are considered to be of importance by the human brain which in turn generates new or strengthens current behaviors. Pynta et al. (2014) claim that encoding of explicit material confined in the advertisement of a product permits the brain to integrate this data into consequent characters later on. The authors also state that these verdicts propose actionable perceptions towards the current nature of multi broadcasting for content producers and journalists. Instead of being simply regarded as a disruption, the interface could be an influential harmonizing method to stimulate engagement of audience in broadcast television (Pynta et al. 2014, p. 78). Guo and Chan-Olmsted (2015) on the other hand discovered that socialization is a strenuous procedure controlled by various aspects, especially, variables associated with programs, like preferences of the genre, engagement, attraction, and personal innovativeness attribute. The connection between rising social media platforms and traditional television could be credited to the rising acquisition of social media gears by audiences and the progressing multitasking and cross-platform designs found in the tools (Guo & Chan-Olmsted 2015, p. 240).

Social Media Influence to Television Audiences

Moe, Poell, and van Dijck (2016) classify three scopes which influence television audiences and their interaction with social media: (1) the specific techno-advertisement methods of social media platforms and television producers. (2) If a public or commercial journalists use social media, and (3) the culture observed in national television (Moe, Poell & van Dijck 2016, p. 3). Their article on Rearticulating Audience Engagement offers a primary systematic approach to analytically contextualize and relate experimental results on the connection between engagement of audiences and social media. According to the article, the growth of social media happens to be making changes to the television platform; the universe is transiting from watching television to cohesive structures of watching (Moe, Poell & van Dijck 2016, p. 2). The article explains how conservative concepts of viewer engagement are moving within the mass media reception, distribution, and production whereby social media undertake a progressively essential part.

Publicness and Directedness

According to Liu and Kang (2017), with social media platforms enticing a vast array of handlers and being significant sites for disclosing ourselves, then we are what we write as posts since viewers make interpretations of our posts and make perceptions of us consequently. The authors experimented to investigate how directedness and publicness of Facebook personal disclosure posts influence the reader's impressions and acknowledgments of the message as well as its source (Liu & Kang 2017, p. 3). Their findings demonstrated that higher publicness contributed to observers making dispositional ascriptions concerning the intended impression from the message sender; self-disclosure was not viewed as being intimate that much (Liu & Kang 2017, p. 10). Furthermore, the owner of the message was seen as less sociable because of such dispositional credits.

Impacts of Social Media on Impression and Social Culture

According to Liu and Kang (2017), undesirable self-exposure on social media platforms was further associated with violation of social culture and was not valued to be publicized unless it was directly targeting someone. Directness and publicness influence the development of impression if the exposure is concerned with an individual's undesirable characteristic since bad self-exposure is more deterring when it comes to the context of communication. The authors discovered that directing adverse public self-exposure to others can make it essential as it gives more relational clarifications and hence justifies the unsuitability of the message composer (Liu & Kang 2017, p. 30). Nevertheless, with its nature, directedness indicates exclusivity, and a lot of elitism from a third-person point of view may be undesirable if the person sending the message had previously generated a limited setting with other approaches.

Audience Preferences

From Guo and Chan-Olmsted's (2015) experimental results, audiences in possession of firmer favoritism to certain genres of programs, portray more attraction for the program. The audiences perceive this programs to be of extra importance and relevance in their everyday living, tend to actively make use of available social media platforms to follow up on television programs (Guo & Chan-Olmsted 2015, p. 249). By the prognostic power of the viewers, social traits in their daily engagements, personal interaction instead of socializing happened to be expressively projecting in social engagement experiences. The outcomes suggested that although people have ample chances for interpersonal communication with relatives, friends, or families, they desire to communicate with other program viewers with similar preferences on social media (Guo & Chan-Olmsted 2015, p. 250).

Moe, Poell, and van Dijck (2016) further assume that the application of social media essentially entails a kind of viewer liberation. Social media facilitates the conversion of viewers into dynamic prosumers or partakers (Moe, Poell & van Dijck 2016, p. 2). During the early years of Twitter and Facebook, social media happened to produce a user who was extra active and engaged, and motivated to create and share information on the platforms although how these media contributed to television audience cultures, differed among countries. The authors state that several theorists assume that the integration of social media in the television platform leads to a more commodification of the viewers (Moe, Poell & van Dijck 2016, p. 3). Even though this conflicting viewpoint signals us to the manner in which viewer involvement is entwined with developing advertising tactics and corporate representations of social media, it also leads to questions on practices users generate after coming across media services.

Conclusion

A message's publicness is further connected to an observation of impression managing objectives and reduced intimacy. On the other hand, a message's directedness is linked to an insight of social goals in the context of social media platforms. Social media television audience has become progressively crucial for advertisers, filmmakers, and broadcasters since they rationalize their venture in programs, as well as acquiring consumers, thus enhancing program constancy, the attraction of products, and identifying and marketing the best-valued viewers. The more innovative tendencies that viewers display, the more likely they are to use various social media in obtaining the program's information, interacting with celebrities via Twitter, forming close relations with fellow audiences by blogging and engaging in online discussions.

References

Guo, M. and Chan-Olmsted, S.M., 2015. Predictors of social television viewing: How perceived program, media, and audience characteristics affect social engagement with television programming. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 59(2), pp.240-258.

Liu, B. and Kang, J., 2017. Publicness and directedness: Effects of social media affordances on attributions and social perceptions. Computers in Human Behavior, 75, pp.70-80.

Moe, H., Poell, T. and van Dijck, J., 2016. Rearticulating audience engagement: Social media and television. Television & New Media, 17(2), pp.99-107.

Pynta, P., Seixas, S.A., Nield, G.E., Hier, J., Millward, E. and Silberstein, R.B., 2014. The Power of Social Television: Can Social Media Build Viewer Engagement?: A New Approach to Brain Imaging of Viewer Immersion. Journal of Advertising Research, 54(1), pp.71-80.

Van Dijck, J. and Poell, T., 2015. Making public television social? Public service broadcasting and the challenges of social media. Television & New Media, 16(2), pp.148-164.