#queueyoutea

(Lewis and Partners, 2012)

“Social media is increasingly playing an important role in television; playing a key role in the promotion of upcoming shows, being utilized for on-air interactions with the audience across a variety of genres, and also as a tool for measuring the success of a show, at least with the audience segment which social media represents.” (Woodford, et al 2014, 1) While many users may not know it, they are actually creating data when they tweet about their favourite TV shows using relevant terms or hashtags. The utilization of this “big data” is termed by Woodford as being television metrics or “telemetrics”, “the application of Sabermetric principles to television ratings, and more immediately the use of social media to promote, and enable interaction with, television networks and franchises.” (Woodford, 2014).

(Teen Wolf, 2014)

Big data can be utilized by market researchers regarding TV engagement. For example, television shows have flocked to Twitter as a way to engage with their audiences and promote their respective programs. Teen Wolf engages its audience through various online platforms. It has its own Tumblr page through which they upload and reblog content as well as interacting with fans; the Twitter page does the same things but with the organizational element of hashtags. At the moment they are using #Season4Alphas as a hashtag on their official Twitter page for users to nominate their friends to be “Alpha of the Week” (MTV Teen Wolf, 2014).

(New Girl Facebook, 2014)

New Girl utilized the same strategy with Facebook – a “fan of the week” spotlight was enlisted with the possibility of people who mentioned the show on their Facebook could be featured on national TV (Darling, 2012).

In the case of TV programs, official hashtags cause “more posts to aggregate” (Darling, 2012) and therefore collate data useful for market researchers and the networks to inform themselves on trends and opinions of the respective show.

(Proulx, 2012 - Yellow is #Glee; red is #saturdaynightGLEEver)

The TV show Glee which usually has an official hashtag of #Glee spurs around 75,000 tweets per episode but still alters Twitter hashtags trends; this is evident through new hashtag #saturdaynightGLEEver which aired during an April 2012 episode and was employed by Twitter users over 8,500 times (Darling, 2012).

Harrington (2013) states that "TV can be enhanced when experienced alongside others” and describes social media as acting as a virtual lounge room for audiences to share their experiences of episodes. Hashtags enable users to find and contribute to conversations they are interested in and link their contributions to a wider discussion. It is arguable that networks and data analysts benefit more from the use of hashtags as it provides them with marketable big data and information on the viewing habits and opinions of unsuspecting audiences – it essentially harnesses “Twitter as a means to inconspicuously observe the activities of TV audiences” (Harrington, 2013). However, audiences do benefit from the collation of hashtagged conversations as it makes those respective conversations easier to find and contribute to.

Social media platforms have become vehicles for political change and activism. One of the first examples of this new media movement is evident within the 2001 impeachment trial of Philippine President Joseph Estrada in which protesters converged through mass text messaging to public demonstrate against his retention of his political position. It became the first example of a political movement orchestrated through a new media platform. (Shirky, 2011)

(Adamsick, 2009)

There have been successful and unsuccessful uses of social media platforms regarding political protests. Moldova in 2009 was host to a so-called “Twitter Revolution”, in which the Communist Party lost power after social media orchestrated protests (Shirky, 2011). In contrast to this is the Red Shirt Uprising of 2010 in Thailand where social media organized protests were not consistently strong and were eventually disbanded with lethal force by the police (Shirky, 2011).

“Long before social media helped ignite the Arab Spring and other uprising in tense parts of the world, analysts say Ukraine's Orange Revolution in 2004 was the first revolt to organize and promote itself via the internet.” (Hilleary, 2014) In 2000, Georghiy Gongadze, the journalist of an online newspaper focussing on government corruption and abuses of power, was found beheaded. It came to light through secret audio recordings that President Leonid Kuchma had ordered his murder. 5,000 protesters marched in Kyiv for an independent investigation into Gongadze’s murder and for the president’s resignation (Hilleary, 2014). The internet proved a vital factor in allowing people to access information (such as the secret audio recordings), and was arguably instrumental in the public outcry about Georghiy Gongadze’s murder.

Joshua Tucker, a Professor of Politics at NYU, notes that with the current unrest that "every time there's a big moment in the protests, we see a surge in new Twitter accounts created per day.  And by the end of February, whereas before the crisis there were 50 new accounts created a day, by the end, we're looking at 600 to 800 accounts being created a day.” (Hilleary, 2014) Research findings have illustrated that social media has been utilised within Ukraine “to organize help when needed and to motivate other people to join the protest.” (Vlachou, 2014)

Gladwell states that “where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools”( 2010); this has been exemplified through the terming of the Moldova “Twitter Revolution” and of Ukrainian protesters being more Facebook based (Hilleary, 2014).

(Hillburn, 2014)

During these periods of conflict or political unrest, these social media platforms have served as ways to circulate news: “following the initial blockade on Twitter someone in Turkey spray-painted the Google DNS service’s IPv4 addresses — 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4 — on a public wall, suggesting it as a way to bypass the ban.” (Tung, 2014)

It has become evident that social media platforms have become political vehicles, revealing information to the masses, allowing protestors to mobilise and organise, and enabling news to spread internationally. “The disconnected, the diaspora, the long-tail of people craving change become part of the movement of people thanks to social media” (Rosenblatt, 2014), and while social platforms do not facilitate political change, they provide tools and affordances for people to connect and push for political reform.

YouTube becomes the new host to 100 hours of video every minute. It has become a viable source of income for over a million YouTube users and thousands of these users are making six figure sums each year (YouTube, 2014). It has become a focal point of entertainment in the contemporary world but has not been exempt from criticism.

New media platforms have been equated with youth with YouTube reaching more US adults aged 18 – 34 than any cable network (YouTube, 2014). Historical concerns about tools of cultural production and cultural record being in the hands of the masses (and most pertinently, the hands of youth) can be seen mirroring the apprehension about YouTube and contemporary youth. For example, the advent of the pauper press in the early 19th Century and the emergence of portable handheld cameras at the beginning of the 20th Century were met with moral panic regarding the implications of youth, morality, and the impact of these new media (Burgess, Green, 2009).

Burgess and Green (2009) state that journalists have adapted to using moral panic as a part of their journalistic repertoire as they end up promoting the negative elements of new media by circulating offensive content as a representation of the new media platform. A particular case of this would be footage uploaded to YouTube and reporting upon by the media of Casey Heynes, a Sydney schoolboy who fought back against a bully (Michael, 2011). This was seen as representative of the content hosted by YouTube and ignited debates about bullying and new media’s involvement with potentially encouraging it.

Elana Shefrin (2004) notes that the internet is a site of the political struggle between participatory democracy and economic power and this is evident when participatory fandoms are restricted or barred from creatively contributing via platforms such as YouTube.

Burgess and Green (2009) note that certain content on YouTube serves as redaction material in that these separate productions consist of edited existing content together. Abiding by this definition, people who remix material (such as YouTube vidders) and mash-up songs are producing redaction material but have to explicitly state that no copyright infringement was intended in the descriptions of their content lest their productions be banned from the site. This has been in response to YouTube removing this creative content under copyright infringement claims.

(AirGirlPhantom, 2013)

(MissElys7, 2014)

These two YouTube users have contributed redaction content to YouTube with the user, MissElys7, utilising the mash-up song created by user, AirGirlPhantom, for the fandom video she created for The Hunger Games: Catching Fire. This sense of participation and community within YouTube is often overshadowed by what Burgess and Green (2009) describe as journalist’s manipulation of moral panic regarding new media.

(Bad Lip Reading, 2013)

Bad Lip Reading’s videos – such as their “The Walking (And Talking) Dead” compilation using footage from AMC’s The Walking Dead – can be classed as redaction content as the premise of their videos is to remix existing footage with new, humourous audio.

YouTube has become a hub for entertainment and creativity but – as with many new technologies – fear has been a historically cyclical reaction to new media; this moral panic is a focal point for contemporary journalism. Redaction content on YouTube engages users with the participatory fandom but does highlight issues regarding the tension between the participatory democracy and economic power.