Hybrid media consumption: How tweeting during atelevised political debate influences the vote decision

Misa Maruyama, Scott P. Robertson, Sara Douglas, Bryan Semaan, Heather Faucett

Research output: Chapter in Book/Entry/PoemConference contribution

47 Scopus citations

Abstract

An increasing number of people are using microblogs to broadcast their thoughts in real time as they watch televised political events. Microblogging social network sites (SNSs) such as Twitter generate a parallel stream of information and opinion. It is presumed that the additional content enhances the viewing experience, but our experiment explores the validity of this assumption. We studied how tweeting, or passively observing Twitter during a debate, influenced affect, recall and vote decision. For most measures, participants' average feeling and recall toward the candidates did not depend on Twitter activity, but Twitter activity did matter for vote choice. People who actively tweeted changed their voting choice to reflect the majority sentiment on Twitter. Results are discussed in terms of the possibility that active tweeting leads to greater engagement but that it may also make people more susceptible to social influence.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCSCW 2014 - Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1422-1432
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)9781450325400
DOIs
StatePublished - 2014
Event17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2014 - Baltimore, MD, United States
Duration: Feb 15 2014Feb 19 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work, CSCW

Other

Other17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, CSCW 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityBaltimore, MD
Period2/15/142/19/14

Keywords

  • Digital democracy
  • E-participation
  • Ecitizenship
  • Microblogging
  • Social media
  • Social networking

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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