Enjoying social tv: re-discovering the social process and big data research
- Autores: Jinju Kim
- Directores de la Tesis: Jordi López Sintas (dir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona ( España ) en 2019
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Tally Katz-Gerro (presid.), Avi Astor (secret.), Marc Verboord (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Creación y Gestión de Empresas / IDEM, Doctorate in Entrepreneurship and Management por la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TESEO
- Resumen
Social media, online sharing platforms, and online TV industry among other innovations in communication technologies have dramatically changed the media production and consumption environment. The globalization of the media markets is probably the most critical consequence of this digital revolution. However, the majority of previous research in cross-cultural studies have been framed in western productions (the US mainly) distributed to the rest of the world and conducted using traditional data gathering and analytical tools. Therefore, blindly applying these previous research frameworks to the globalization of media markets may reduce our ability to describe how global audiences enjoy media productions through online TV channels and interpret consumers’ role in the popularity of eastern media products. These new questions remain unexplored and refer us to the study of consumers’ experience watching eastern media products in terms of cultural values, enjoyment, and emotions by global audiences including western audiences.
One of the most recent and essential phenomena in the global digital media entertainment ecosystem is the advent of social TV merging television and social media. Emotional expressions are of the utmost importance to describe viewers’ enjoyment with social TV. From a research viewpoint, this dense online conversations and flow of comments carry valuable information about online viewers' experience of the media contents they have been exposed to. To examine the information embedded in the vast body of text data present in social TV we use a series of advanced computer-aided text research methods, such as sentiment analysis, topic modelling, and network analysis that have been rarely employed so far in communication studies. For the first time, this study adopts a mixed research approach to analyse the audience behaviour of Korean TV series in social TV with qualitative data (viewers' real-time comments) and advanced quantitative methods developed for big-data analyses.
The first contribution of the thesis identifies the expression of emotions embedded in viewers' comments and measures the intensity of audiences' enjoyment. We consider three different linguistic groups of global viewers, English, Spanish, and French in a multicultural context. The results suggest that the cultural groups do not influence the way consumers express their emotions when watching Korean TV series, but do influence the intensity with which they are expressed in comments.
The second contribution consists in examining the parasocial interaction of audiences with media characters in Korean TV series through social TV and measure its relationship with the popularity of cultural products. We identify the thematic content expressed in real-time comments with topic modelling, a new analytical tool for automatic thematic analysis. This is the first research that identifies and measure the influence of parasocial interaction on the popularity of cultural media products.
The third contribution reveals a theory that explains the evolution of the social interaction networks of an artist called Big Bang Theory of stardom. Socially shared emotional experience among viewers seems to be the starting point of a social process. The results of network analysis among the viewers' comments identify and explain the process of transformation of the social network of artists from entering the market until they become famous.
To sum up, this research reveals that successful non-western media products on social TV are the ones capable of stimulating global viewers' emotional reactions and their social affective interaction with media characters. Media characters turn to be fundamental for the media popularity only when they are able to create a capillary structure of interactions network among audiences. We conclude that social TV provides a promising new way of understanding the global audiences’ behaviour of multidirectional cross-cultural consumption in the new media environment.
