Connected co-viewing: the interweaving of user-generated content and viewing practices in the brazilian prime time telenovela genre
- Autores: Fernanda Pires de Sá
- Directores de la Tesis: Antoni Roig Telo (dir. tes.), Carlos Alberto Scolari (codir. tes.)
- Lectura: En la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya ( España ) en 2017
- Idioma: español
- Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Pere Freixa Font (presid.), Gemma San Cornelio Esquerdo (secret.), Nicoletta Vittadini (voc.)
- Programa de doctorado: Programa de Doctorado en Sociedad de la Información y el Conocimiento por la Universitat Oberta de Catalunya
- Materias:
- Enlaces
- Tesis en acceso abierto en: TDX
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Dialnet Métricas: 2 Citas
- Resumen
Co-viewing refers to the practice of sitting together in front of a TV set, watching and making meaning from television content. The experience of co-viewing depends on the time-space where it occurs, on the company of co-viewers, on the genre viewed and on the materiality involved to be enacted.
Connected media and technologies have largely amplified the possibilities for co- viewing, by allowing people to do it virtually and in multiple screen devices.
Television viewing still retains a position of centrality for understanding what it means to live in a connected environment, as television content also got spread in an array of devices and viewing possibilities.
The objective of this research was to identify and examine the main practices that were interweaving with connected co-viewing and user-generated content (UGC) activities while viewing the Brazilian prime time telenovela genre. Although telenovelas can be considered a melodramatic genre, Brazilian telenovelas have a socio-realistic orientation that is interesting for scrutinizing co-viewing because they are known for promoting political debate on subjects ranging from racism and homophobia to corruption.
Over six months in 2015 (March to August) a participant observation was conducted to understand connected co-viewing practices through three cases studies: two non- official closed Facebook groups, and one WhatsApp group. Semi-structured interviews and a qualitative survey were the methods implemented in this research.
As a new telenovela would air, this period was selected for understanding an ongoing phenomenon from its very beginning, where normativity and procedures are established in the co-viewing practices, until its end when a new telenovela starts, and the groups change. The co-viewed telenovela in these groups had a controversial plot that sparked many co-viewing practices and led to political discussions and prompted debate across the groups, throughout multiple media, and among Brazilian conservative congress members.
For this research, a body of work on social practices, mainly based on Schatzki and other authors of the second wave of practice theory was used. This theoretical- methodological tool was used to explore connected co-viewing activities because practices are considered sets of interconnected and routinized everyday activities carried out by human agents through the use of a different kind of materiality.
Therefore, a practice approach, in all its variety, allows observing human activity through everyday practices and its entanglement with materiality. Additionally, the communicative ecology approach based on Altheide used by media anthropologist such as Tacchi, Hearn, among others was also implemented, as it provides a holistic outline of the context in which practices occur. This approach reveals the materialities, the beliefs, powers, and the traditions involved in the communicative practices of groups and individuals, as well as the reasons for people’s connection and role’s position in a practice.
By participating in the connected co-viewing within the groups, it was possible to understand that users co-view in those spaces because they can criticize the television network, enact practices that would be constrained by the telenovela producers, such as sharing links, collecting and archiving data without the copyright permissions.
Additionally, users seek to belong to a group, where they can extend the ritual of watching telenovela that first took shape in their living rooms, with their families during their childhood.
This study demonstrates that UGC is a practice that always requires the involvement of people, even when it is just for doing dispersed activities such as searching and reading information. It was also revealed that for users who do connected co-viewing on Facebook, the act of giving an opinion or sharing any telenovela content means producing content, and this sometimes affects the content they receive on this platform, as they receive too much telenovela information or information from the users they interact the most.
Furthermore, through different kinds of engagement with UGC and by co-viewing practices viewers considered whether a prime-time telenovela should be pure entertainment or should be mixed with educational purposes. They contrasted and reflected about their own lived realities with the ways the telenovela they co-viewed portrayed the current socio-political events occurring in Brazil during its airing. Thus, demonstrating that the features of the television genre together with the features and agencies of the space where it occurs might shape the way co-viewing engagement happens.
