Together Alone: Motivations for Live-Tweeting a Television Series Steven Schirra, Huan Sun, Frank Bentley MIT Comparative Media Studies Cambridge, MA USA {schirra, sunhuan, bentley}@mit.edu ABSTRACT viewers either DVR or download television programs to In this paper, we explore motivations for live-tweeting watch at their convenience (and fast-forward through across a season of a television show. Using the third season commercials), encouraging live viewing practices such as of Downton Abbey as a case study, we followed 2,234 live- live-tweeting has become a priority for the television tweeters from the show's premiere episode to its finale, industry. In the realm of social television, Twitter activity finding that nearly a third of users returned each week to has become a standard for measuring the real-time impact tweet. Semi-structured interviews with 11 diverse live- of television shows. Networks also routinely display an tweeters revealed that the decision to live-tweet is official hashtag at the beginning of each show to encourage dependent upon a variety of personal considerations and live-tweeting. The Nielsen Company, the lead TV audience social conventions forming around this emerging TV measurement firm in the United States, has created the viewing practice. This includes the desire to feel connected “Nielsen Twitter TV Rating,” set to debut in late 2013.1 to a larger community that is interested in the show. Participants actively sought to protect the user experience As live-tweeting and television become more of others by following good live-tweeting “etiquette,” interconnected, understanding the user motivations behind including limiting their number of posts and censoring this practice can lead to better social television experiences. content that might spoil the show for others. Over time, Much of the previous work on television live-tweeting has live-tweeting helped users build and maintain a network of focused on the quantitative study of television events, such fellow Downton Abbey viewers with shared interests. as presidential debates [16, 17], or single television episodes within a series [8, 11, 16]. In this mixed-methods Author Keywords study, we expand upon existing research by looking at live- Live-tweeting; annotation; user research; social television; tweeting behavior related to a serial drama whose story second screen; Twitter unfolds across multiple episodes. In particular, in order to guide the design of future social television systems, we ACM Classification Keywords sought to understand what motivates viewers to live-tweet H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): and why they continue to participate in this online activity Miscellaneous. throughout the season. We were also interested in how people balanced watching the show and tweeting as well as INTRODUCTION exploring browsing versus posting behaviors. The use of Twitter during live television viewing has become an increasingly common practice. Using second Using the PBS serial drama Downton Abbey as a case screen devices such as laptops and mobile phones, viewers study, we identified a sample of 2,234 users who live- collectively annotate and provide commentary for their tweeted the show’s highly publicized third season premiere favorite programs in real time, often using show-specific and studied their activity across subsequent episodes. We tags and keywords. For fans, the act of “live-tweeting”—the wanted to understand the extent to which this activity was real-time annotation and discussion of television shows on sustained beyond the novelty of the first episode, especially Twitter—can provide an instant, online forum for in light of other popular television shows airing at the same connecting with others watching the same show, making time. In addition, semi-structured interviews were TV viewing an even more social experience. completed with 11 diverse live-tweeters that focused on the motivations behind their Downton Abbey live-tweeting This emerging practice has also caught the interest of activity. This research suggests that live-tweeting is a television networks and advertisers. At a time when many complex social process with its own set of emerging Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or conventions and practices. Understanding these conventions classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full has wide implications for the development of television citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others programming and second screen applications. than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]. 1 CHI 2014, April 26 - May 01 2014, Toronto, ON, Canada http://www.nielsen.com/us/en/press-room/2012/nielsen- Copyright 2014 ACM 978-1-4503-2473-1/14/04…$15.00. and-twitter-establish-social-tv-rating.html http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2557070 PREVIOUS WORK Relatedly, Lochrie and Coulton [8] conducted a quantitative Earlier research on social TV focused on the design and study around the reality TV show X-Factor, finding that, study of companion systems meant to enhance viewers’ unlike with previous work studying debates, in which social connections with friends and family. Rather than tweets rarely correlated with the specific topics being focusing on asynchronous, online discussions about TV, discussed by politicians, live-tweets related to this these systems connected viewers together during live entertainment show significantly correlated to the content broadcasts. For example, AmigoTV offered viewers a suite of the program. The authors speculate that the visuality of of social tools for viewing television with friends, such as entertainment programming is more conducive to second- voice chatting and on-screen animated emoticons [4]. screen interactions. Another system, Social TV 2, combined lightweight messaging with a physical device to signal when others Several qualitative studies have analyzed the types of with the system were watching television, allowing users to content live-tweeters post about television. Wohn and Na coordinate viewing together at a distance [6]. While these [18] analyzed the content of tweets posted about both a systems did not enjoy widespread adoption, viewers political speech and a reality television show. Categorizing continue to tap into real-time audio and video tools offered the tweets in an AEIO matrix—attention, emotion, by programs such as Skype and Google Hangouts to watch information, opinion—they found that the content of live- television with friends at a distance [9]. tweets correlated strongly with the television show content. They also observed a rise in tweeting activity during In the case of FriendFeeds, Basapur et al. [1] developed a commercial breaks. second-screen application to encourage the sharing of related content about a show amongst already-existing In study of live-tweeting around the show Glee by small groups of friends. McPherson at al. [11], viewers discussed live-tweeting as a way to feel connected to a wider audience of viewers, a The popularity of microblogging services such as Twitter feeling also expressed by viewers in our study of Downton has shifted much of the discussion about social TV toward Abbey. A content analysis of Glee tweets showed that the second-screen applications that allow large groups of two most common tweet categories were providing play- viewers to collectively annotate a television show as it airs. by-plays of the action unfolding on the screen, and making Twitter allows for more open conversations among comments about their enjoyment of the episode or the show interested viewers beyond friend groups. Huang et al. [7] in general. While McPherson et al collected data from found that users tag content on Twitter to participate in multiple episodes, they did not look at temporal activity conversational “micro-memes”—time-sensitive, ad hoc throughout the season or motivations to continue tweeting discussions around a topic. Conversational tagging is from week to week. particularly relevant to television live-tweeting, as using show-specific hashtags helps categorize a particular tweet Previous work on Twitter and television focuses almost while also providing a window into wider conversations exclusively on the content of Tweets, however we are with friends and strangers about a television show. interested in the context of Twitter use and specifically on user motivations for live-tweeting and understanding Live-tweeting itself has been studied in previous work from emerging practices. Our work reveals users’ motivations to a variety of perspectives. Using social network analysis, live-tweet throughout the season and is informed by a wide Doughty et al. [5] studied how users converse on Twitter array of considerations, both personal and social. during different types of television shows (reality TV and a current events show). They found that entertainment- DOWNTON ABBEY oriented shows exhibited less reciprocity in Twitter Downton Abbey is a period drama set in post-Edwardian mentions than the current events show. Conversation about England, following the lives of an aristocratic family and its entertainment shows was more focused on discussions with large staff of servants. The show’s third season aired for celebrity Twitter accounts, while discussions around the seven episodes in the United States between January and current events show occurred among smaller, connected February 2013 on the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), a groups of friends. non-profit television network. This show provides an interesting social television case study for several reasons. Researchers have also looked at aggregate live-tweeting First, the show was the subject of much critical acclaim, data to help them understand how television events unfold. thus making its return to television a highly anticipated Shamma et al.