Rearticulating Audience Engagement: Social Media and Television

Abstract

This introduction to the special issue on social media and television audience engagement sketches the key dimensions that affect how audiences are transformed through the development of social platforms. Building on the five contributions to the special issue, we identify three dimensions that deserve further attention: (1) the character of national media cultures, (2) whether social platforms are employed by public or commercial broadcasters, and (3) the specific techno-commercial strategies of television producers and social media companies. By exploring these three dimensions, the article presents a basic analytical model to systematically compare and contextualize empirical findings on the relationship between social media and audience engagement.