"Social Watching" to Learn About and Discuss Civic Issue: How Receiving Positive Social Media Feedback While Watching a Broadcast Instills a Sense of Community
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2016-05
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University of Hawaii at Manoa
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People increasingly turn to social media to augment their broadcast viewing experience with a parallel stream of information and opinion. Known as “social watching,” the practice of integrating broadcast media and social media has become routine for people tracking live events and breaking news. Researchers have studied the phenomenon through content analysis and social network analysis, but few have used experimental methods. This empirical study examines how different levels of interactivity and types of opinions on social media influence the way people think and feel about civic issues. The findings make several contributions to the literature on social watching. Firstly, the results suggest that receiving positive feedback to social media posts instills a sense of community in the poster. The group of participants who received this validation reported feeling a significantly stronger sense of group membership, mutual influence, needs fulfillment and emotional connection. The second major contribution of the study is a better understanding of conformity during social watching. People who viewed a social media feed containing negative posts developed significantly more negative attitudes toward a civic issue compared to people who viewed posts that were supportive or balanced. The third contribution of this work is a deeper understanding of the types of thoughts and emotions associated with social watching in civic contexts. An inductive analysis of retrospective thought-listing data suggests users thought about Emotion (My Emotions and Their Emotions), Metacognition (Knowledge Level and Questions), Narratives (My Story and Their Story), Judgments (My Future, Their Future, Evaluating Arguments and Action) and Media (Session Media, General Media and Tweeting). The themes emphasized the critical role emotions and stories play in making sense of social media related to civic issues, as well as the way people empathized with the experiences of other citizens. The research addresses a gap in the media effects literature, which has focused on the effects of receiving a message, rather than the effects of sending a message on the sender. More specifically, it examines how receiving positive feedback when discussing a civic topic influences the way people relate to each other and connect around a civic issue.
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Theses for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (University of Hawaii at Manoa). Communication & InfoSciences
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