Presentation delivered during the 4th national STS Italia conference. Rovigo, 22 June 2012. Authors Fabio Giglietto [fabio.giglietto@uniurb.it], Luca Rossi [luca.rossi@uniurb.it] Department of Communication Studies - University of Urbino Carlo Bo Abstract The public by default nature of Twitter messages, together with the adoption of the #hashtag convention, led during the last few years to the creation of a digital space able to host world-wide conversation on almost every kind of topic (Bruns, 2011; Honeycutt & Herring, 2009; Huberman, Romero, & Wu, 2009; Marwick & boyd, 2010). Beside the adoption of hashtag based conversations as a way to deal with crisis and natural disasters, this practices has been largely adopted as an effective way to share the experience of watching television. So far research on this phenomenon has been focused mainly on large media events (Dayan & Katz, 1994) where Twitter participation occurred as part of the media experience of a single and unique event (Rossi, Magnani, & Iadarola, 2011). These topical discussions take place outside of the standard Twitter network made of follower and followee and represent one of the most interesting recent examples of social shaping of digital media. Hashtag conversations, as well as the idea of the hashtag itself, do not come, in fact, with Twitter’s original feature but instead exploit available affordances of the media (Bruns, 2011; Tumasjan, Sprenger, Sandner, & Welpe, 2010). This paper bring a substantial contribution to the understanding of how Twitter users’ real practices can reshape the experience of contemporary television by focusing on the study of an appointment based TV show: Servizio Pubblico. Servizio Pubblico is a political talk show aired weekly starting from November 3rd 2011 simultaneously, both on Pay-TV, a large number of local broadcasters and streamed online live on several websites. This peculiar airing/streaming strategy, as well as the more traditional weekly appointment schedule, represents an unexplored scenario for Twitter based studies. The paper will focus on the following research questions: RQ1. Is the Twitter conversation network of Servizio Pubblico changing over the several weeks of the show airing? Is it possible to identify a definite set of participants or are they changing every week? RQ2. Is the conversation mainly made of comments on what is happening in the show or the topic addressed by the TV show actually ignite some debate? RQ3. Can the Twitter activity be considered as a good indicator of a TV show success? How can it be compared with more traditional data such as the number of viewer or the audience share? The three RQs will be addressed by analyzing, with a quanti-qualitative methodology, a dataset of over 90,750 Tweet containing the #serviziopubblico hashtag gathered starting from the October 26th 2010.

1. IV STS Italiana National Conference
Rovigo 21-23 June 2012
Analyzing #serviziopubblico:
networked publics, appointment based television
and the structure of Twitter conversation
Fabio Giglietto – Università di Urbino Carlo Bo
Luca Rossi – Università di Urbino Carlo Bo

2. #serviziopubblico:
Political TV show aired from Nov. 3rd
2011 to June 7th 2012 (27 episodes)
Multiplatform: Satellite TV + Local TV +
Streaming
(partially) Crowdfunded: 100k
subscribers rised more than 1M €

3. #serviziopubblico:
14
12.03
12
10.42
10 9.7
8.88
8.08 8.01
7.75 7.65 7.66 7.5
8
6.89 6.85 7.08 7.02
6.71
6.11 5.93 6.3 6.2 6.2 6.26
6
6 5.2
4.99
4
2
0
Share (%)

4. research questions:
RQ1. Is the Twitter conversation network of Servizio Pubblico changing
over the several weeks of the show airing time? Is it possible to identify a
definite set of participants or are they changing every week?
RQ2. Is the conversation mainly made of comments on what is happening
on the TV show or the topic raised by the TV show are able to ignite some
debate?
RQ3. Can the Twitter activity be considered as a good indicator of a TV
show success? How can it be compared with more traditional data such
as the number of viewer or the audience
share?

5. dataset:
Twitter data acquired through
discovertext from Oct. 26th 2011 to
June 1st 2012.
158.240 tweets
31599 users
Subdataset: airing time of 25 episodes
of the show (9.00 pm – 00.30 am)

6. 0
10000
12000
2000
4000
6000
8000
2011-Oct-26
2011-Oct-31
2011-Nov-05
2011-Nov-10
2011-Nov-15
2011-Nov-20
2011-Nov-25
2011-Nov-30
2011-Dec-05
2011-Dec-10
2011-Dec-18
2011-Dec-23
2011-Dec-28
2012-Jan-02
2012-Jan-07
2012-Jan-12
2012-Jan-17
2012-Jan-22
2012-Jan-27
2012-Feb-01
2012-Feb-06
2012-Feb-11
2012-Feb-16
2012-Feb-21
2012-Feb-26
2012-Mar-02
2012-Mar-07
2012-Mar-23
2012-Mar-28
2012-Apr-02
2012-Apr-07
2012-Apr-12
2012-Apr-17
2012-Apr-22
2012-Apr-27
2012-May-02
2012-May-07
2012-May-12
2012-May-17
2012-May-22
2012-May-27
Twitter activity
2012-Jun-01

7. RQ1. Is the Twitter conversation network of Servizio
Pubblico changing over the several weeks of the
show airing time? Is it possible to identify a definite
set of participants or are they changing every week?

8. users tweet
1%
28%
9%
36%
90%
1% of the users made
28% of the tweets while
36%
90% of the users made
36% of the tweets
Users’ activity
(whole dataset)

9. The average user twitted during almost 2 episodes (1,88)
[var 4,15 σ 2,03]
Core group:
(> 50% of episodes) 177 users (0,78% of the users)

10. Core group activity:
tweet ReTweet RT/Tweet n
Core 22178 4139 18,6% 177
Group (19%) (14%)
Main 92902 25233 27,1% 21996
Group

11. @net (177 core users)

12. RQ2. Is the conversation mainly made of comments
on what is happening on the TV show or the topic
raised by the TV show are able to ignite some
debate?

13. 6000
5000
4000
RT
3000
2000
1000
0
0 1000 2000 3000 4000 5000 6000
Tweet originali

14. Qualitative analysis:
Title: Celentano c’è
Date: 23 Febbraio 2012
Audience: 1.688.000
Share: 6,71 %
Tweet (21:00 – 00:30): 8604
Coded Tweet: 8604

15. Coding Matrix:
Inbound Outbound
subjective Emotion Opinion
objective Att. seeking Information
*ReTweets and @reply have not been coded
Tweeting about TV: Sharing television viewing experiences via social media message
streams by D. Yvette Wohn and Eun–Kyung Na. First Monday, Volume 16, Number 3 - 7
March 2011

16. Attention Seeking: «Mi sono perso qualche
informazione e/o riflessione indispensabile stasera?
Sempre gli stessi ospiti no? #serviziopubblico »
[timoteocarpita – 00:15]
Emotion: «Celentano io ti amo #serviziopubblico»
[dashingdesiree – 22:45]
«Confermo: Celentano è un coglione
#serviziopubblico»
[Geras0ne – 22:44]

17. Information: « “La RAI sembra una succursale del
Vaticano” Marco Travaglio #serviziopubblico »
[beaimpera – 23:35]
Opinion: «#serviziopubblico Sono d’accordo con
Belpietro, cosa sto fumando ? »
[memolabile – 22:28]

18. 10
15
20
25
35
40
45
30
0
5
2012-02-23 21:00
2012-02-23 21:04
2012-02-23 21:08
2012-02-23 21:12
2012-02-23 21:16
2012-02-23 21:20
2012-02-23 21:24
2012-02-23 21:28 Sondaggio web
2012-02-23 21:32
2012-02-23 21:36
Mineo
2012-02-23 21:40
2012-02-23 21:44
2012-02-23 21:48
2012-02-23 21:52 Belpietro
2012-02-23 21:56
2012-02-23 22:00
2012-02-23 22:04
2012-02-23 22:08
2012-02-23 22:12 Annunziata
2012-02-23 22:16
Attention Seeking
2012-02-23 22:20
2012-02-23 22:24
2012-02-23 22:28
2012-02-23 22:32 Belpietro
2012-02-23 22:36
2012-02-23 22:40 Isola ser pubb
Emotion
2012-02-23 22:44
2012-02-23 22:48
2012-02-23 22:52
Celentano
2012-02-23 22:56
2012-02-23 23:00
2012-02-23 23:04
2012-02-23 23:08
Dario Fo
Information
2012-02-23 23:12 Franca Rame
2012-02-23 23:16
2012-02-23 23:20
2012-02-23 23:24
2012-02-23 23:28
2012-02-23 23:32
Belpietro
Opinion
2012-02-23 23:36 Annunziata
2012-02-23 23:40
2012-02-23 23:44
2012-02-23 23:48
2012-02-23 23:52
2012-02-23 23:56
2012-02-24 00:00 Annunziata / farfallina
2012-02-24 00:04
2012-02-24 00:08 Di Pietro
airtime (23/02/2012 21:00-00:30)
2012-02-24 00:12
2012-02-24 00:16
2012-02-24 00:20
Coded Tweet created during the show
2012-02-24 00:26

20. RQ3. Can the Twitter activity be considered as a
good indicator of a TV show success? How can it be
compared with more traditional data such as the
number of viewer or the audience
share?

21. Viewers Tweet activity correlation
Tweet Tweet RT Url Tweet/RT
(21:00 – 00:30)
Originali
viewers - 0,15 - 0,06 - 0,25 - 0,30 0,58

22. Conclusions:
• There is a relativly small and extremly
active part of the audience following the
show on Twitter on a regular basis;
• The topics discussed by Twitter users are
strictly related to the contents of the
show;
• Is not possible to find a significative
correlation between the users activity on
Twitter and the audience of the show;

23. Future works:
- Comparative analysis with types of
TV shows and other italian political
shows
- Developing an improved codebook
for Twitter TV viewing
- Evaluating more complex audience
previsional models

24. Acknowledgements
Thanks to Servizio Pubblico staff for
provinding both the detailed share and
structure of the whole season episodes;
Thanks to Mario Orefice for the help in
coding the data.