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Are there predictable patterns of media-audience accumulations over time? Do they differ from one medium to the next, or between types of activity within a given medium? The author explores some of the facts, makes some inferences, and indicates how to broaden the current body of knowledge in this important area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The hypothesis of this work is that social TV can add to traditional TV audiencehood a sense of collective belonging—“we the public”—that is fundamental for any political action. After a quantitative account of users’ patterns of activity during half a TV season, a qualitative methodology is adopted to understand the variety of social TV logics. Thus, a model of four different kinds and meanings of using social TV is developed: from the most engaged (civic-informative use of social TV) to the most recreational (the game use), from the outburst of emotions (emotional use) to the identity-building and awareness use. Each of those represents various forms of relationships among individuals in a social medium environment, and between them and other actors of the wider contemporary mediated public space, such as civic and political groups, and political news media professionals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore the perks and perils of social TV as a strategy for networks to drive tune-in to episodes as they air and to strengthen audience engagement. I do so by examining reality singing competitions in the United States, and specifically the NBC show The Voice. In analyzing the development of social media use in the program over the course of its first seven seasons, I identify a participation dilemma. This dilemma results from the fact that in giving viewers influence over aspects of the production to create an emotional investment, producers relinquish control over the contents of the show, which needs to appeal to large audiences. In addition, I classify the applications of social media: promotional, affective, functional, and phatic. In discussing these examples, I show how the “new” strategies of social TV hark back to “old” strategies that predate their use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building on economic and cultural theories about transnational media flow, this study investigates individual countries' self-sufficiency in broadcast television programming. It traces and predicts the airtime shares of domestic and American programs, using longitudinal data taken at decade-long intervals during 1962-2001 for 20 countries or territories worldwide. Regression analysis reveals that the airtime share of homemade programs is an increasing function of the size and affluence of that country's domestic audience. That of American shows is, in contrast, negatively related to not only the same economic descriptors, but also the cultural distance of that country from the U.S. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I assess theories of Internet-enabled public participation as they have been devised to explain the audience participatory projects of Current TV, a global cable and satellite television and Internet video network once partially programmed by nonfiction videos submitted by viewers. I explore how each authors' theory of participation-convergence (H. Jenkins, 2006), crowdsourcing (J. Howe, 2008), and neoliberal participation (J. Hands, 2011)-variously fails and succeeds to historically and culturally situate Current TV within its sociocultural context as a mixed mission and market digital social entrepreneur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social media have been theorized as being able to break the press' monopoly on agenda-setting, giving the public greater influence over which stories are covered in the news. This study uses a cross-lagged panel analysis to determine to what extent audience conversations on The Rachel Maddow Show's Facebook Page may have influenced the selection of issues covered in the TV broadcast. Results show a positive correlation between stories discussed on Facebook and the subsequent airing of similar stories on TV. The evidence also suggests that social media may enable many factors that influence both the media and the public agendas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The successful television show Idols is set up around a talent competition where a large number of contestants compete to become the nation's next Pop Idol. Contestants are selected by expert judges and audience voting determines the competition's outcome. Scarce attention has yet been given to the influence of the contestants' personal characteristics on the outcome of the show. Based on findings from creativity research and career psychology, we explore what individual characteristics predict success within the Dutch Idols competition. A sample of audition contestants (n = 369) and contestants who entered the final rounds (n = 27) completed our survey. We conclude that successful contestants are characterized by higher levels of musical socialization and insecurity, lower levels of intrinsic motivation, more experience in performing and a higher self-evaluation of appearance. We argue that the concept of “preparedness” explains the majority of our findings: those contestants who survive the first selection rounds are not the ones that start from zero. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The international success of formats such as Pop Idol and Big Brother owes much to the ways in which they combine a number of broadcast and digital platforms under the aegis of a common 'brand'. The article argues that the media industry strategists behind such formats have come to rely on extending existing broadcast conventions of liveness and eventfulness by means of audience participation via digital return channels. It argues that such participation invites a sense of presence, heightened immediacy and involvement in the live event. The article emphasizes how such features are being developed by the broadcast media industry to exploit audience participation for the purposes of revenue, competitive edge and strategic expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 21st century and the rise of new media have accentuated socio-political as well as organizational/practical challenges to public service broadcasters. New political vision is needed to address fragmenting and pluralizing societies; however, the challenge in turn lies in program production. This article examines and relates developments in both areas via a seldom-applied approach to transformations in traditional media organizations, namely close-range production study of large, prestige programs. An underlying assumption is that prestige projects can highlight key institutional ambitions, dilemmas and obstacles of change, and it is brought to bear on a national participatory event in the Norwegian public service broadcaster NRK. The article studies how institutional practices can be twisted into a new course due to internal and external pressures condensed in large projects, and thus assesses the pace at which public service broadcasters are exploring their remit, a pace to which academics and policy makers alike need to be closely attuned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents an empirically based examination of how the Norwegian television industry incorporates audience activity and audience-generated material, and of how audiences respond to the opportunities presented. It explores three main research questions: First, how extensive is audience activity on television? Second, to what degree do different television activities correspond to familiar patterns of social stratification? And third, is there any evidence for the view that digital feedback channels, such as SMS and the Web, provide access to television for new groups of people? To investigate these questions, a case study of the Norwegian media market has been carried out, based on two data sets. The extent of audience activity is examined through a representative audience survey conducted during a period of two weeks in 2004. The second data set is a one-week survey of Norwegian television output on the six Norwegian-language channels in 2005. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents the origins of the development of a quality index for broadcast television in Chile, the main findings of its application in the year 2007, and their comparison with findings obtained in 2006. A theoretical analysis of the concept of quality in the mass media industry and a qualitative study that shed light on the concept from the viewpoint of the industry, as well as that of TV audiences and advertisers, provided the background to generate an index whose main strength is that it integrates the opinion of viewers, their behaviour, the intrinsic quality of the product, and distinction in form and content according to programming genre. The results of the second application of this index show that in terms of quality, Chilean television is considered to be of average quality, with news programmes as the best-evaluated and miscellaneous/general entertainment programmes with the poorest evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite the efforts of social scientists, journalists, and programme hosts themselves to defend and assign importance to audience discussion programmes, these have been classified as "Trash TV". The accusations leveled at these programmes, as observed in the bibliography, is that they create a show out of information and allow for the free display of emotions while pretending to provide a social service. Our study is based on the premise that linguistic analysis of small talk in these programmes sheds light on their complex framework. The study of the corpus will show that small talk not only serves a moral power that reflects the contents of the themes and the participants as representatives of a community, but that it reflects a social reality that has to be understood as the vehicle of an ideology whose role is to shape the audience's opinion. Finally, the analysis proposes that small talk exerts a powerful social cohesion force over that same community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses formations of fan cultures in terms of intermediality. It examines the construction and consumption of media in three different Finnish fan groups: the fans of Xena: The Warrior Princess (XWP), fans of Ally McBeal and the fans of Finnish TV-host Marco Bjurström. The construction of intermedial relations of each fan group interestingly reveals the institutional and technological spaces of shaping the pleasures of media. The intermedial relations of researched fan groups vary according to a traditional use of media to a use of new media. The intermedial relations in XWP fan culture were produced mainly between television and the Internet. This intermedial connection provided space for fans' self-definition, community and fan production. Intermedial relations in the case of Ally McBeal were encouraged by the media companies between television and tabloid papers as well as between television and the Internet depicting the show as topical and trendy. However audiences were mostly engaged with only television and Ally McBeal didn't nurture multiple uses of media. Again in the case of Bjurström, the relation between television and tabloids and the particular portrait type of media coverage constructs this fandom as a traditional star-fan relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on archival research in order to explore the cultural circulation of the early quiz show in Britain — the conceptions, interpretations and evaluations which structured its development. The history of the British quiz show remains particularly neglected in television scholarship, and is often only discussed in relation to the advent of commercial television. Here it is usually invoked as the epitome of ITV's bid to woo the audience with 'cheap', undemanding and 'trivial' fare. This association between the quiz show and commercialism has rendered the BBC, a public service broadcaster, particularly invisible in quiz show history. But the BBC played a crucial role in developing the broadcast conception of the quiz/game show well before ITV was part of the cultural landscape. Ranging across both radio and television, it is this history that is explored here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the motivating factors for viewer participation in the reality television programme, Project Fame. It looks at the interactive component of reality television, arguing that viewers are active in their media consumption. The theoretical foundation of this study is based on the uses and gratifications theory as well as the cultural studies approach to reception theory. On a methodological level, this study applies qualitative research methods in order to determine what factors motivate viewers to participate interactively in the television programme. Supported by the categories of need gratifications, this study concludes that cognitive, affective and personal integrative needs motivate viewers to utilise the various interactive opportunities and that viewers expect gratifications from participating interactively. In addition, reception theory is used to further explain viewers active participation and interpretation of media messages in a social and cultural context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: When a game has more than one Nash equilibrium, a coordination issue arises. Pareto and risk dominations are two available criteria to select one of them. There is a debate on how to use these criteria when they point in different directions. We study the first wave of the Weakest Link show broadcast in France to generate field data on this issue. Observed behavior can be rationalized in terms of Pareto and risk-domination. The payoff-dominant equilibrium is selected if it is not too risky otherwise players coordinate themselves according to risk-dominance. This rationalization is in line with the experimental literature. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The article focuses on the film that presents a compelling and particularly American moral dilemma wherein it provides the scaffolding that helps basic writing students to construct convincing argumentative essays. The author discusses plot and background information on the film "Quiz Show" wherein it chronicles the true story of the 1950's television quiz show scandals. The pointed out that using the film is particularly effective with developmental writers since it provides them with the structure they need to develop their critical-thinking skills and learn how to organize an argumentative essay centered on a basic thesis.

This paper demonstrates how a call-on-hold is used to accomplish some delicate interactional work involving a talk-show host, a co-host, and a guest expert. In particular, it shows how a proscribed topic is reanimated. The caller herself plays a passive role; it is the call rather than the caller that is crucial. The call is used ‘subversively’, to create a false sense of what is going on. The paper aims to illuminate both some general properties of calls-on-hold and special functions of such calls as they occur on call-in talk shows. In order to understand how the call-on-hold is being used in the instance under consideration, it was necessary to examine call-openings as they occur on this show and, in particular, the common occurrence of the ‘second summons’, as well as a variety of other matters (e.g., story prefaces, self-interruption) of sequential import. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The promotion of the witness and the consecration of the public as an actor on TV programmes have led to indepth changes in the public sphere. The relation between the public and the private have appreciably changed. The public sphere tends to be presented in the form of an evaluation of experiences, feelings and inclinations rather than by a number of opinions. Demonstration is replaced by exhibition and display. This new public sphere is no longer modelled on rational discussion as Jürgen Habermas described it. These changes are linked to the promotion of individualism and to the extension of the culture of psychology to the masses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the popularity of television talk shows by linking audience involvement in Epideictic discourse. Omnipresence of television talk shows in the generic television program schedule; Development of principles of a theory of epideictic discourse; Influence of genre on the level of participation of viewers.

Speaking for the Public Representation and Audience Participation during the 1997 British General Election Campaign. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I analyze the talk of lay contributors in TV and radio variants of audience participation shows. Lay contributors use their initial occupancy of the floor to produce turns in which they take up positions, or argue with others' positions, on an issue. I explore some key rhetorical devices and strategies (understood as techniques of "artifice or finesse") used by lay contributors in making their cases. I discuss the ways in which a particular set of rhetorical forms functions as a format for achieving completeness in an extended audience-directed utterance, and thereby help to coordinate lay contributors' points and the studio audience's response to what has been said. I show that ordinary citizens speaking in the situations provided by audience participation debate shows can be just as adept at using effective rhetorical devices as are more seasoned public speakers, and moreover, that they are able to do so in improvised, rather than previously written, discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies the effect of sex and violence in program advertisements on audiences' viewing habits in the U.S. Code of programs used in the study; Percentage of the ads that had sexual content; Section of the advertisements that used violence in promoting a program.

Focuses on the receiver-oriented concept of active audience as a fundamental to the study of mass communication effects in general. Emphasis of the voluntary and selective nature of the interaction between audience and mass media; Suggestion that audience activity might be better with audiences exhibiting varying amounts of activity; Types of audience activity; Suggestion that people who watch television network news vary considerably in the degree to which they meet the criteria of an active audience.

The article focuses on the benefits of radio and television broadcasting for the listeners and viewers of family life education program. Broadcasting provides a special quality of personal intimacy in communication and can reach those people with various levels of literacy and generation. In addition, the audience will also find it more convenient to listen and view family-related matters through broadcasting rather than to attend to seminars and lectures at a specified place and time. The authors suggest that the family life program should consider the various orientations of the audience in order for it to be successful.