Social Television, #Hashtag & Virtual Citizenship

Social Media platform such as Twitter has altered the way people approach to television broadcast. Through this tribune, audiences can comment, retweet on programs , reply, contribute and reach sum of followers. Tweets are public and contain a timestamp where Twitter can provide forums to participants to view others’ opinions, sensationalize their beliefs with humorous on events and posts. It is identified by their hashtag , hashtag seems to represent an ideal applicability criterion as they enable the easy identification of relevant tweets. The following study aims at examining the engagement of Twitter’s users with television programs to gather between new media and traditional media emerging the phenomenon of “Social TV”. The phenomenon of using a second screen while following a television program is quickly becoming a widespread practice. In August of 2013, Nielsen Media Research released data that there was a two-way casual influence between Twitter activity and television ratings (Finn,2013) . This study will focus on the phenomenon of Social TV and test users’activities on social media while watching television program.