Last weekend provided an opportunity to compare the three currently running Australian reality television series, and their social media presence, with Big Brother Showdown on Saturday night, and both X-Factor and Masterchef airing on Sunday. For current purposes, analysis uses the official hashtag of each show, which will exclude a number of tweets using #bigbrother …
Continue reading “Australian Reality TV on Twitter: A Two Horse Race”
Over at my own blog, I have been running an almost-daily series of posts looking at the current US reality series “Big Brother”, now in its 15th incarnation in the US (the 10th Australian series starts in a week or so). While I’ll direct you there for all of the details, here is a brief summary of …
Continue reading “Big Brother 15, West Coast Viewers & Guilt by Association”
The new year has barely begun, but I’m delighted to say that we’ve already clocked up our first publication for 2013: Information, Communication & Society has just published an article by Tim Highfield, Stephen Harrington and me which expands on our paper at the Association of Internet Researchers conference in Salford in October 2012 and …
Continue reading “Starting 2013 with an Article on Twitter and #Eurovision”
A key theme in our recent research is the place of Twitter in the wider media ecology, globally as well as in specific domestic contexts. There are a number of ways that the relationship between Twitter and other media forms and platforms may be examined, and our papers at the AoIR conference in Manchester in …
Continue reading “Twitter and the Media in Europe and Australia”
The Mapping Online Publics Team is currently busy at the CCI Winter School, but here, at least, are a handful of very quick updates. First, my colleagues Stephen Harrington, Tim Highfield and I have published a brief think piece in a volume published by the COST Action (a peculiarly bureaucratic name given to EU-funded research …
Continue reading “Some Brief Updates: Twitter and Television, Arab Spring Symposium”
The first part of this post examined some of the basic stats on Twitter use during the 29 April 2011 royal wedding. Here, we’ll try something a little different: in the tweets using the #royalwedding hashtag between 00:00 and 23:59 GMT that day, what other hashtags were also used? Hashtags, of course, aren’t mutually exclusive, …
Continue reading “Twitter and the Royal Wedding, Pt. 2: Something New”
OK: I realise this may induce some cognitive dissonance in susceptible readers while those images of the London riots continue to flash across our TV screens (and we’re now also tracking some of the Twitter coverage of the riots and subsequent cleanup – more on that some other time, if anything interesting emerges). For some …
Continue reading “Twitter and the Royal Wedding, Pt. 1: Something Processed”
Television programmes spruiking their associated Twitter hashtags is now a common spectacle; we’re seeing this for everything from political debate (#qanda) to reality TV (#masterchef). One particularly successful example of this viewer engagement strategy was SBS’s recent Go Back to Where You Came From mini-series, which aimed to raise the tone of Australia’s depressingly low-brow …
Continue reading “Tweeting at the TV: Some Observations on #GoBackSBS”
As something of a distraction from our recent focus on the role of social media during natural disasters, I thought I’d share a few observations on the use of Twitter during the Oscars broadcast a few days ago. In addition to their massive global TV audience, the 2011 Academy Awards also featured the #Oscars hashtag …
Continue reading “Twitter Spoils the Oscars Party for Channel Nine”
