New article: Dual Screening the Political: Media Events, Social Media, and Citizen Engagement
/Update: We wrote a feature on this piece for the Washington Post’s Monkey Cage section. Click here to read it.
Cristian Vaccari, Ben O’Loughlin and I have a new article out in the Journal of Communication. This is the first piece from an ongoing project on dual screening and hybrid political media events.
We were keen to theorise dual screening and to develop a new type of research design that enables large response panel surveys but which also really gets inside what it means to people to dual screen big political media events—and the engagement behaviours that may follow.
Here’s a link:
And here’s the abstract
Dual screening—the complex bundle of practices that involve integrating, and switching across and between, live broadcast media and social media — is now routine for many citizens during important political media events. But do these practices shape political engagement, and if so, why? We devised a unique research design combining a large-scale Twitter dataset and a custom-built panel survey focusing on the broadcast party leaders’ debates held during the 2014 European Parliament elections in the United Kingdom. We find that relatively active, “lean-forward” practices, such as commenting live on social media as the debate unfolded, and engaging with conversations via Twitter hashtags, have the strongest and most consistent positive associations with political engagement.
As ever, happy reading!
And if you would like a copy of the paper, just drop one or all of us an email.
