Socially Mediated Stranger Things: Audience Cultures and Full-Season Releases Notes

Socially Mediated Stranger Things: Audience Cultures and Full-Season Releases - Polis and Gipin

Introduction

• Research on social television has primarily focused on regularly scheduled broadcasts.

• The advent of full-season releases (FSR) on streaming services disrupts traditional patterns.

• The article proposes an "atomized engagement model" as an alternative to the linear model of social television.

• Keywords: social television, fandom, social media, "binge-watching," streaming services, audience studies, Stranger Things.

Literature Review

• Social television involves real-time and asynchronous discussions among fans on social media platforms.

• Full-season release (FSR) is the practice of streaming services making all episodes of a series available at once.

• Streaming television was successfully launched in 1995 by Progressive Networks.

• Netflix introduced the idea of streaming service with monthly fees around 2008.

• The 2012 release of Lilyhammer on Netflix was the first time a series was released in its entirety, giving way to the concept of FSR.

• Binge-watching: watching original and new content one episode after another with minimal breaks in between.

• The term “binge watching” originated in 2003, referring to watching a marathon of an entire series on DVD.

• Social television is defined as "the use of social media stimulated by television programs" (Buschow, Schneider & Ueberheide, 2014, p. 129).

• Social media platforms act as a "form of ‘social cement’ which binds together characters and narrative strands … binds viewers to each other as they gossip about the show, and establish an active relationship between viewer and program" (Fiske, 2011, p. 77).

• Active viewers form a “collective knowledge community” (Jenkins, 2008).

• Active viewers see television-based discussion forums as a way to challenge the secrecy of a series and work together to draw conclusions.

• Linear engagement cycle (Buschow, Schneider & Ueberheide, 2014):

  • Pre-communication: analysis of upcoming series' commercials, teaser trailers, promos, interviews.

  • Parallel communication: discussions about the most recently aired episode.

  • Post-communication: discussion of the entire season.

• Full-season releases disrupt established viewing and engaging practices.

• FSRs established a specific time anchor for beginning a binge viewing session.

• FSRs removed the anchors of scheduled releases around which social television users structured their interactions.

Research Question

• In what ways do viewer engagement patterns for FSR series correspond to or deviate from the linear model?

Methods

• Netflix drama Stranger Things was selected as a focus FSR series for analysis.

• Data collection began on September 26, 2017, one month before the release date, to monitor pre-communication.

• No specific end date for data collection was set.

• Figure 1. Stranger Things Series Timeline.

• Monitoring all of the relevant technologies available, it was possible to gain a better understanding of how each platform operates.

• Platforms chosen: Twitter, Instagram, Reddit and FanFare.

• Twitter is a microblogging platform with messages (tweets) of 140 characters or less (since expanded to 280 characters).

• Instagram, a visual platform, is used by television fans to upload photos and videos.

• Hashtags act as a connecting tool that helps shrink the immense world of social networking into topical communities.

• Reddit (http://reddit.com) is a free social networking forum that allows users to post content and exchange news (Park, Conway & Chen, 2018).

• FanFare is a subsite of the community weblog Metafilter (http://fanfare.metafilter.com), with designated forums for discussions.

Data Collection

• Twitter Archiver, a Google Chrome add-on, was used to track tweets related to Stranger Things based on a set of identified hashtags.

  • #StrangerThings2, #mileven, #upsidedown, #StrangerThings, #whereiswill, and #worldupsidedown.

• Picodash (https://www.picodash.com/) was used to collect data for Instagram.

  • #StrangerThings, #StrangerThingsFanArt, and #StrangerThingsSeason2.

• Data for Reddit and Fanfare were collected manually.

  • The two subreddits dedicated to Stranger Things, “Netflix Stranger Things” and “Stranger Things on Netflix,” were monitored daily.

• All of the data collected were reviewed using an immersive, iterative process to identify themes and patterns.

• Common post patterns included countdown, plot, rewatching, parasocial, fan art and first-timer posts.

• Plot posts and first-timer posts were the sole post types to appear on all four platforms.

• First-timer posts: Posts regarding the completion of the first season.

• Rewatching is not a new behavior, Buschow et al. (2014) did not include such a phase within their linear engagement model.

• Countdown posts were only found on Twitter and Instagram.

• Parasocial posts and fan art were exclusive to Instagram.

• Parasocial relationships: connectedness that a user feels toward a character.

• Fanart: fan-made drawings or projects centering around the object of a viewer’s fandom.

• Around November 9, approximately 13 days after the series was released, the content of social television discussions began to change, signaling a shift in the viewer engagement cycle.

• TwitterArchiver saved a total of 281,967 tweets from six different hashtags; Picodash had recorded 7,968 Instagram posts from three hashtags; 42,501 posts were made to two Stranger Things-related subreddits; and FanFare had 396 posts made to two seasonal discussion threads about the show.

Discussion

• Fans utilize social media in different ways for a full-season release compared to the linear engagement model.

• FSRs shift the locus of control to audiences.

• The analysis of socially mediated discussions of Stranger Things thus makes it possible to understand how fans self-organize in terms of both viewing behavior and social television practices for FSR series.

• These behaviors and practices may be conceptualized as similar to the movement of atoms moving freely through time and space, acting individually for viewing but coalescing for social engagement.

• Atomized engagement model: still carries pre- and post-communication phases, but fans now have the ability to steer through these phases largely as they please, without a broadcast entity imposing a pre-determined viewing schedule.

• Parallel communication also exists but is self-organizing rather than occurring on a fixed timetable.

• The linear engagement model classifies stages according to where audiences fall in their viewing with relation to when a season airs: before (pre-communication), during (parallel), and after (post-communication) (Buschow, Schneider, & Ueberheide, 2014).

• Synchronous viewing has been deemed an essential requisite for social television practices (Baughman, 2013).

• Individuals could move freely through the series and engage with the show at whichever point and for the duration of time they desired.

• Some users could even find themselves in a quantum state of occupying multiple phases simultaneously.

• For conversations analogous to the parallel communication phase, viewers are instead forced to seek out people who are at the same point in their viewing.

• At the macro level, one can observe phase transitions reflective of the linear engagement model, though at a greatly accelerated pace compared to traditional television schedules.

Atomized pre-communication phase

• The media promoted posters and entertainment journalists crafted articles for the upcoming season.

• This suggests that the macro audience entered the pre-communication phase.

• However, on the micro level, individual fans were engaging in multiple phases.

Atomized engagement phase

• Atomization takes place at every stage of this model, but its departure from the linear engagement model is most apparent after the pre-communication phase.

• Fans are not only allowed to determine their own viewing schedules, they are required to self-organize for social engagement.

• This freedom resulted in fans moving through the series at different paces, in an atomized fashion.

• The ability for viewers and fans to navigate back to old episodes while watching the new series at their own discretion, while interacting with other viewers at the appropriate level, is what atomizes and distinguishes this model from the one developed by Buschow, Schneider, and Ueberheide (2014).

Atomized post-communication phase

• In the linear model, the parallel engagement phase has a clear end date determined by the network, but the atomized engagement phase does not.

• Around November 30, almost five weeks after the release of the season, the overall tenor of social media posts shifted.

• These overlapping viewing and communication patterns creates a potentially endless engagement cycle.

• The atomized post-communication phase is continuous and linked to the other engagement phases, as fans who have watched the entire series can rewatch and interact with other fans at any stage of the viewing process.

The impact of affordances

• Some platforms lend themselves better to these atomized, or asynchronous, discussions than others.

• Some of the key differences in engagement behaviors were thus determined by the social media platform chosen and individual preferences, rather than imposed by an external entity such as a broadcasting network.

• Previous research on social television models has focused primarily on Twitter.

• With fans watching on any number of different timetables, Twitter’s immediacy revealed itself to be a weakness when it comes to FSRs.

• Twitter is therefore less attractive for those who stretch out their consumption beyond the first couple of days, or who wish to take advantage of atomization and move in and out of different stages and craft detailed questions or observations.

• Similar limitations apply to Instagram, which is also tied to a temporal structure.

• Discussion boards such as Reddit and Fanfare offer more flexibility.

• People can move seamlessly between the different discussion areas depending on where they are in their viewing progress, and the kind of conversations they wish to have.

• Their organizational structure proves to be more flexible in allowing viewers to take full advantage of new social television opportunities offered by FSRs.

Spoiler management

• Spoilers: “premature undesired information about how a narrative’s arc will conclude” (Johnson and Rosenbaum, 2014, p.1069).

• Fans earlier in the viewing process risk being advertently subjected to viewing spoilers while scrolling through different platforms.

• Reddit and FanFare have created specific sub forums to discuss each episode of a series, but Twitter and Instagram’s technical feature do not offer many strategies to managing spoiler content.

• These systems grant considerable autonomy to fans in how they choose to navigate discussions.

• This structural difference in platform affordances leads to different, more communal, discussions on Reddit and FanFare compared to Twitter and Instagram.

Conclusion

• The progression of technology has created new distribution modes for television, such as full-season releases.

• The atomized engagement model seeks to account for fans’ viewing autonomy, which allows them to be anywhere in the engagement cycle at any time, while still free to engage in social television conversations with other viewers, appropriate to their point in the process.

• This study had several limitations.

• Future researchers may wish to investigate questions regarding the types of fans who use different social media platforms, and whether their choice of platform is indicative of differences in their engagement with the television content, or simply of their existing online habits.