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The Changing Nature of Viewership: Formality of Social Media

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 IRL
broadcast
Happening
aired and
The Changing Nature of Viewership:
media
event
anchored
temporally,
Formality of Social Media Conversations
not lending Partha Mukherjee categories across platforms and classify the
itself for Pennsylvania State University predominant phase and category by formality across
delayed State College, PA 16802, USA the three social networks. For formality analysis, we
viewing. pom5109@ist.psu.edu identify musicals as dominant category on Twitter,
commercials and musicals categories as dominant on
Second Computing
Bernard J. Jansen Tumblr, and game as the dominant category on
screen device used
Social Computing Group Instagram this event. The formality analysis over
for posting
Qatar Computing Research Institute. phases shows that the Post phase is dominant for
social media
Hamad bin Khalifa University commercial and game categories on Twitter, while no
content to the
Doha, Qatar phase is dominant for musicals. The During phase is
social
jjansen@acm.org predominant on Tumblr. Interestingly, the Pre phase
soundtrack
shows formality predominance for commercials and
while viewing Abstract musicals, while the Post phase is more formal for game
an event on a We research second screen interactions that form a social media conversations.
primary social soundtrack concerning a major broadcast media
screen event by performing statistical analysis on more than Author Keywords
Social Collection of 3,000,000, 800,000 and 50,000 social media posts Social soundtrack; web search; cross-platform analysis;
soundtrack social media from three social media platforms (Twitter, Instagram second screen.
posts from and Tumblr) concerning Super Bowl XLIX for three
second categories (commercials, musicals and game) during ACM Classification Keywords
screens three phrases (Pre, During, and Post). We identify J.4. Sociology.
relating to a significant differences in formality among phases and
particular IRL
Introduction
event
Paste the appropriate copyright/license statement here. ACM now The integration of broadcast media events, mobile
Web Submission of supports three different publication options: technologies, and social media sites has created
search a key-phrase • ACM copyright: ACM holds the copyright on the work. This is the
historical approach. synergic online interactions that can impart feelings of
as a query to • License: The author(s) retain copyright, but ACM receives an togetherness, enable information sharing, and enhance
a search exclusive publication license.
• Open Access: The author(s) wish to pay for the work to be open conversation among people in dispersed locations,
engine
access. The additional fee must be paid to ACM. facilitating the creation of a social soundtrack (i.e.,
Table 1: Definition of Key This text field is large enough to hold the appropriate release statement
online conversation) for events and associated content,
Constructs assuming it is single-spaced in Verdana 7 point font. Please do not
change the size of this text box. such as advertising. This synergy of technology is
Each submission will be assigned a unique DOI string to be included here.

Figure 1: IRL Event Category
Game for Super Bowl XLIX
Figure 2: IRL Event Category
Halftime Show for Super Bowl
XLIX
Figure 3: IRL Event Category
Commercials for Super Bowl XLIX
expediting a change in the nature of viewership from a
passive activity to participating in an event.
The use of secondary screens affords the creation of
what we refer to as the social soundtrack, the online
interaction with others regarding a broadcast program,
particularly for In-Real Life event (IRL) events such as
Super Bowl, Academy awards, Grammy awards etc.
The effect on the role of the viewer is profound, as the
nature of viewership is transiting from a passive to an
active one, where the viewer can, to some degree, take
action while watching.
For this research, we study Super Bowl XLIX as an IRL
broadcast media event. The broadcasts of IRL events
are often associated with substantial social
soundtracks, as IRL events do not lend themselves to
recordings for later viewing, unlike, for example, a
seasonal TV show (see table 1). Therefore, they
provide for the creation of online conversations for
particular periods. We investigate the use of second
screens in the Pre, During, and Post phases (see table
2) of Super Bowl 2015, specifically examining if second
screen formalities from viewer interactions concerning
Super Bowl commercials, game, and musicals
categories (see figures 1-3) differ in each of event’s
phases or if second screen formalities different by
phase for each category. We select three popular social
media platforms (Twitter, Instagram, and Tumblr) as
our data collection sites (see table 3).
These research findings are important changes in
linguistic style indicate the credibility and rapport
developing among people in second screen
conversations who most often do not know each other.
Additionally, it is essential to understand how viewers
engage and leverage the affordances of their
technology devices for information sharing and other
activities of event participation.
Research Question
This research utilizes Super Bowl XLIX, as this event
was the most-watched American television broadcast in
history, at the time of this study, with an average
audience of 114.4 million viewers [5].
There is considerable information and comment sharing
in the social soundtrack on three aforementioned
categories not only during but before and after the
Super Bowl event. We label these temporal phases of
the Super Bowl social soundtrack as: a) Pre phase, b)
During phase and c) Post phase (see table 2 and 3). As
we collect data related to Super Bowl 2015 from the
10th of January 2015 and continued till the 24th of
February 2015 on the three social media platforms, the
Pre phase begins on 1/10/2015-00:00:00 and continue
till 2/1/2015-18:29:59 (till the start of the kick off).
The During phase is the period of the live broadcast of
the event, i.e., from 2/1/2015-18:30:00 to 2/1/2015-
22:30:00. The Post phase is the social soundtrack
beginning on 2/1/2015-22:30:00 and lasted till
2/24/2015-00:00:00 (see table 4). During the data
collection period, we amass 3,112,789 tweets from
Twitter, 811,262 Instagram posts, and 51,569 Tumblr
blogs using APIs for each respective social media
platforms (see table 3).
We frame our research questions to evaluate the
formality of the second screen conversation within the
Super Bowl 2015 phase-category space.
 RQ1. Whether formality of second screen conversation Hypothesis 05: There is a significant difference in social
Pre Pre phase
w.r.t Super Bowl categories in the social soundtrack soundtrack formality of second screen conversation in
Super highlights the
significantly differs among Super Bowl phases? the During phase among Super Bowl categories.
Bowl audience lead up
Phase conversation in
RQ2. Whether formality second screen conversation Hypothesis 06: There is a significant difference in social
social media and
w.r.t Super Bowl phases in the social soundtrack soundtrack formality of second screen conversation in
can start weeks
significantly differs among Super Bowl categories? the Post phase among Super Bowl categories.
ahead of the
event.
We examine our research questions by forming six Data Collection and Research Design
During The During research hypotheses. The first three hypotheses Using data from all three social media platforms, we
Super phase is the address social soundtrack formality of Super Bowl classify the data into the three categories
Bowl period of the live categories separately among the Pre, During, and Post- (commercials, musical, and game) and three phases
Phase broadcast of the Super Bowl phases on the social media platforms. The (Pre, During, and Post) of second screen interaction for
event, in this second three hypotheses address the Super Bowl each social media platform. We identify the categories
case, from kick phases separately for Super Bowl commercials, by means of the keywords collected from relevant
off to the final musicals and game second screen formality. websites related to Super Bowl commercials [1, 4],
second of the Super Bowl musicals [6], and Super Bowl game [3].
event Hypothesis 01: There is a significant difference in social
Post The Post phase soundtrack formality of second screen conversation The set of Super Bowl commercial keywords contains
Super highlights the related to Super Bowl commercials among the Super the ad titles, titles of the themes / videos for the ads,
Bowl audience Bowl phases. hashtags associated with the spots (e.g.,
Phase conversation in ‘#realstrength’, ‘#likeagirl’ etc.), and the first and last
reaction to the Hypothesis 02: There is a significant difference in social names of actors participating in Super Bowl commercial
event and can soundtrack formality of second screen conversation videos. The list of Super Bowl musical keywords
continue for days related to Super Bowl musicals among the Super Bowl contains the first name and last name of the performers
after the event. phases. of the halftime and the pre-game show, terms that
Table 2: Different phases of describes the half time show (e.g., ‘shark’, ‘palm’ etc.),
Super Bowl 2015 Hypothesis 03: There is a significant difference in social and the songs (e.g., ‘california gurls’). The list of
soundtrack formality of second screen conversation keywords related to Super Bowl game contains the first
Social Media Volume related to the Super Bowl game among the Super Bowl name and last name of the players, coaches, umpires,
Platform phases. referees, commentators, the field
Twitter 3,112,789 positions(e.g.,‘quarter-back’, ‘red zone’ etc.), team
Instagram 811.262 Hypothesis 04: There is a significant difference in social names and other key terms related to game (e.g.,
Tumblr 51,569 soundtrack formality of second screen conversation in ‘punt’, ‘fumble’ etc.). We assign the posts on social
Table 3: Volume by Social the Pre phase among Super Bowl categories. media platforms to Super Bowl commercials, musicals,
Media Platforms or game categories, depending on the presence of
 terms from the respective keyword lists. Prior to any research hypotheses. The critical value of the F(2, >
Phase Start End
analysis, we perform the following pre-processing steps 120) is 2.996 at the 95% confidence interval (α =
Date- Date-
as: a) remove punctuations from the sentences of the 0.05). The results, shown in Table 1, denotes that there
Time Time
posts, b) remove the hashtags, as this does not is a significant difference in average formality the Super
Pre 10th Jan 31st Jan
contribute to the frequency of parts of speech (POS) Bowl social soundtrack related to three categories
Super 2015 - 2015 -
tags, c) remove the usernames addressed by “@” and among all phases for all three social media platforms,
Bowl 00:00: 23:59:59
“RT” within the messages, d) remove the special with the exception of Twitter in musicals in hypothesis
00
characters such as “@”, “RT”, “via” and URLs, e) 02 (middle portion of table 5), where effect size is
During 1st Feb 1st Feb replace all contraction of verb forms to the negligible as partial η2 = 0.004.
Super 2015 - 2015 - corresponding verbs (e.g., “’ll” to “ will”, “’ve” to “
Bowl 00:00: 23:59:59 Table 5. ANOVA statistics for formality in
have”, “’re” to “ are”) f) replace all negations
00 categories
(“neither”, “nor”, “never”, “no”, “negative”, “not”, “n’t”,
Post 2nd Feb 24th Feb Commercials category
“won’t” etc.) to “not”, g) replace a sequence of
Super 2015 - 2015 - repeated characters by two characters (e.g., “coooool”
Social Media Platform FANOVA(2, 12957) p-value
Bowl 00:00: 00:00:00 to “cool”, “ooooh” to “ooh” etc.), f) lowercase the Twitter 27.18 0.00
00 letters and expand the acronyms in the posts to its
Instagram 25.28 0.00
Table 4: Start and End Dates and meaning extracted from relevant online resources.
Tumblr 57.24 0.00
Times for Three Super Bowl Musicals category
phases After pre-processing, we use the Stanford POS Tagger Social Media Platform FANOVA(2, 12957) p-value
to identify the Part of Speech (POS) tags from the Twitter 0.15 0.86
The tagging is followed by tokenized postings on all three social media platforms. Instagram 3.20 0.04
calculation of the F-score: We use the standard tag-set defined by Penn Treebank Tumblr 32.41 0.00
to identify the tags as element of POS class (i.e., noun, Game category
pronoun, verb, etc.) from the tokens by means of Social Media Platform FANOVA(2, 12957) p-value
0.5
∗ Stanford POS Tagger. Formality is expressed as a Twitter 75.90 0.00
function of such POS class elements present in a post.
Instagram 9.84 0.00
We compute the F-score for formality as defined in [2]
100 1 Tumblr 9.90 0.00
(see equation 1) and thereafter calculate the
aggregated F-score in five-minute intervals in phase-
Here, is the average formality
category space, used as the unit of analysis for testing To test the predominant Super Bowl phase(s) among
expressed in percentages of the the categories, we run Games Howell test as post-hoc
the research hypotheses. Higher F-score of formality
number of words belonging to a analysis, and it is found that the During phase is
indicates less casual social soundtrack conversations.
particular POS category with predominant for all three categories in Tumblr, while
respect to the total number of for Twitter, the Post phase is the predominant phase for
Results
words in the posting i in a commercial and game categories. In musicals, no
To examine the research hypotheses, we use one way
particular five minute time phase emerges as predominant in Twitter. For
ANOVA. In SPSS, we run ANOVA test to exam the
window tk.
View publication stats
Conclusion and Comments
In our research, we analyze
research questions regarding
second screen interactions of
Super Bowl 2015. All of these
questions are examined from the
perspective of human information
processing in terms of the
formality and sentiment to the
social soundtrack.
Our research provides
contributions concerning
understanding user behavior and
interaction while viewing mass
media broadcast of IRL event in
an emerging avenue of social
soundtrack research, which can
potentially impact numerous
fields, including the role of
viewership in pop culture.
The shift in users' temporal
interest concerning categories,
formally accounted in this study,
can also help retailers and
entertainment companies to
formulate marketing strategies to
satisfy users’ needs and hence
generate the revenues as viewers
transition from a passive to an
active role.
Note: Post-hoc test tables not
shown due to space limitations
Instagram, Pre and Post phases are the predominant change in stylometric variation for a category in
phases in commercials and game categories different phases. The musical category dominates
respectively. In musicals, both Pre and During phases relative to the other categories in all three phases of
appear as predominant ones. the majority of social soundtracks, except on
Instagram, where formality in the game category is
As shown in table 6, there is significant difference in higher. This may increase the personalization of the
social soundtrack formality over categories in each music products and marketing, allowing brands to
phase. The post-hoc test exhibits the musicals category communicate with viewers in a manner they are
is more formal for Twitter in all three phases, while for comfortable with. In future research, we will analyze
Tumblr musicals is associated with commercials as the the temporal formality/informality of posts from the
predominant categories in all three phases. For admirers of individual artists performed in musical
Instagram, though formality in game conversations entertainment integrated to Super Bowl 2015.
becomes predominant in all three phases, musicals
appears strong along with game in During phase. References
1. Anonymous. 2015. 2015 Super Bowl Commercials.
Table 6. ANOVA statistics for formality in phases
http://www.superbowl-commercials.org/2015.
Pre Phase
2. Francis Heylighen and Jean-Marc Dewaele. 1999.
Social Media Platform FANOVA(2, 19668) p-value Formality of Language: definition, measurement and
Twitter 570.85 0.00 behavioral determinants. Interner Bericht, Center “Leo
Instagram 126.38 0.00 Apostel”, Vrije Universiteit Brüssel, .
Tumblr 148.07 0.00 3. Ty Schalter. 2015. Super Bowl XLIX: Power Ranking the
During Phase Top 25 Players in This Year's Game.
Social Media Platform FANOVA(2, 144) p-value http://bleacherreport.com/articles/2343013-super-bowl-
Twitter 66.26 0.00 xlix-power-ranking-the-top-25-players-in-this-years-
Instagram 15.97 0.00 game/page/2.
Tumblr 6.94 0.00 4. Ad Age Staff. 2015. Super Bowl XLIX Ad Chart: Who
Bought Commercials in Super Bowl 2015.
Post Phase
http://adage.com/article/special-report-super-bowl/super-
Social Media Platform FANOVA(2, 19059) p-value
bowl-xlix-ad-chart-buying-big-game-
Twitter 260.63 0.00
commercials/295841/.
Instagram 262.51 0.00
5. Wikipedia. 2015. Super Bowl XLIX halftime show.
Tumblr 50.38 0.00
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XLIX_halftime_sh
Discussion and Implications ow.
The significant difference in formality of social media 6. Wikipedia. 2015. Super Bowl XLIX halftime show.
postings in categories across phases indicate that http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Bowl_XLIX_halftime_sh
demography of viewers can be identified from the ow.