Hybrid spaces of politics: the 2013 general elections in Italy, between talk shows and Twitter

Abstract

This article analyses the relationship between mediated politics and participation, adopting a hybrid approach that stresses the connections between older and newer media. The study adopts a practice-based approach, considering the ways TV audiences, politicians, and journalists used Twitter in order to participate in the discourses activated around Italian political talk shows, during the ‘permanent’ campaign for the 2013 general elections (from September 2012 to June 2013; 11 shows; 1076 episodes). We analysed these communication practices referring, at first, to the complete collection of tweets, including the official hashtags of Italian political talk shows (2,489,669 tweets). The analysis pointed out that a narrow audience had access to these practices, and that the potential for media and politicians to interact with audiences/citizens and to manage their ‘interpretive engagement’ in the construction of agendas has not been actualized. Furthermore, focusing on a sample of tweets produced around the three main parties (15,737) and the relative TV scene (23), the analysis showed that connected audiences were engaged especially in two forms of participation ‘through’ Twitter during talk shows (opinions/comments and requests for interaction with the TV hosts and guests). The article suggests a newer way to work on big data in order to gather a first-hand narrative of participation, left online by networked publics, without forgetting the contribution older techniques could make to the understanding of hybrid practices of political communication and participation.

Keywords:

• hybridization
• social TV
• Twitter
• political participation
• political communication
• audience studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Laura Iannelli (Ph.D. in Theory and Social Research, Sapienza University of Rome) is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Department of Political Sciences, Communication Sciences and Information Engineering (University of Sassari), where she presently teaches Political Communication and Participation. Full and up-to-date list of publications and CV is available at http://www.polcoming.uniss.it/user/31. [email: [email protected]]

Fabio Giglietto, Ph.D. is Assistant Professor of Sociology of Culture and Communication at the Department of Communication and Human Studies of the University of Urbino ‘Carlo Bo’, where he also teaches Theory of Information. His main research interests are theory of information, communication, and social systems, with a specific focus on the relationship between social systems and new technologies. Full and up-to-date list of publications and CV is available at http://www.mendeley.com/profiles/fabio-giglietto. [email: [email protected]]

ORCID

Laura Iannelli http://orcid.org/0000-0002-1679-0647

Fabio Giglietto http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8019-1035

Notes

1 In the 1990s, concepts such as ‘communicative/media ecologies’ (Altheide, 1994), ‘centrifugal diversification’ (Blumler & Kavanagh, 1999), and ‘remediation’ (Bolter & Grusin, 1999) already started to stress the interconnection between newer and older media.

2 The observed political talk shows were broadcast by public and private channels. They hosted different sub-genres, reached different audiences, with different timing (early morning, prime-access, prime time, and late night) and schedule (daily, bi-weekly, or weekly).

3 The data set of episodes with relative metrics is available at http://figshare.com/articles/new_fileset/809555