Northern Lights: Film & Media Studies Yearbook - Volume 12, Issue 1, 2014

This article presents a close analysis of interactions in cross-media formats with a specific focus on how television ‘is done’ on the web by established sports broadcasters who are used to producing traditional sports television. It will be argued that the web platform promotes significantly altered audience-oriented behaviours compared to traditional television, and that the web ultimately both calls for and produces a new kind of sociability in relation to audiences. It will be proposed in the discussion that this new kind of sociability will have an increasing impact also on how traditional television ‘is done’. The article makes use of data from the sports genre that is normally associated with ‘lighter entertainment’. Therefore the results may not be immediately applicable to how other types of journalistic genres tackle the communicative challenges of new media. However, it will be argued that sports journalism may well be thought of as a frontrunner when it comes to adapting to increasingly ‘sociable’ communicative modes of address. The analysis of web interactions focuses around three overarching audience orientations that are promoted in the web context: superliveness, metadiscourse and complex audience orientation(s). Taken together, these orientations constitute ‘a new kind of sociability’.

The study focuses on a practice that interviewers exploit when asking questions in one-on-one political TV-interviews: they invoke extra parties. This happens when they alter the participant structure of the dyadic talk by speaking on another’s behalf, inserting a video clip that speaks for them, inviting a guest at the table to take up a position in the argument-so-far or embed a physical object with a message in their utterance. The study aims to discover patterns and actions that coincide with the various forms of invoking extra parties. It also investigates whether the exploitation of an extra party touches upon the borderline between neutrality and non-neutrality. The data collection encompasses fragments of interviews taken from the Dutch talk show Pauw & Witteman. The analysis focuses on turn-taking, repair, laughter, face-saving acts and meta-conversation.

Results show that two procedures for invoking extra parties in one-on-one political interviews – inserting a video clip and embedding an object with a message – put pressure on a central value of good journalism: its neutrality.

This article aims to explore dialogic and solidaritarian modes of communication in relation to democracy that builds on communicational exchange in and with the media, and particularly in relation to online news communication. Departing from the fraud dialogue concept, it defines and exemplifies solidaritarian modes of communication, which are argued to better meet the challenges of democracy and online journalism. This theoretical discussion draws on examples from a debate on the reconstruction of the comments sections in Swedish online newspapers. The debate concerned hate speech, freedom of speech/censorship, anonymity/openness, and moderation/registration policies. I argue that solidaritarian modes of communication include and exceed dialogue through their attitude (discursive mode of address) and practice (discursive or non-discursive mode of action) of reciprocal exchange, empathy, responsibility and restitution. A particular underlining of responsibility as journalistic/editorial/publicist indicates the importance of the communicative setting, online journalism, where ‘journalism’ turns out to be more crucial than ‘online’.

This article examines the role of Facebook language tools in shaping and preserving community limits among Jewish Israeli adolescent girls, who constitute a young, dynamic, western and age-specific community. We describe how actions such as confirming friend requests, updating statuses and assigning ‘likes’ serve as means of phatic communication and as deictic elements that sketch out the community’s limits. Based on interviews with eight focus groups comprising a total of 35 Israeli adolescent girls, we challenge the prevalent view that social networks and the Internet in general facilitate fast and superficial transitions between sites and identities. Quite the contrary, we argue that these ostensibly random transitions in fact set clear limits by means of apparently banal authorizations of belonging to a community that occur on a daily basis. These community limits set by this youth communication are more rigid and conservative than those apparent in these girls’ everyday lives offline.

In this article I propose that we can understand talk and conversation in Sherlock (2010) fandom on the micro-blogging site tumblr in three ways: (1) talk through appropriation, (2) talk through interpretation and (3) talk through imitation, and that we can see these through examples of mediatized talk. Sherlock is a popular 90-minute BBC TV series about Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous detective, Sherlock Holmes and his assistant, John Watson, in a contemporary setting. I apply mediatization theory to analyse how specific media logic and affordances shape the way in which fans talk and interact on this social media platform. Furthermore, the analysis includes theory from fan studies and audience studies in order to understand the cultural logic of fan communities, as mediatization is understood as a non-linear, dual process of transformation. Fans use textual narratives, fan-made narratives, popular memes and role playing when carrying out conversations. When these fan practices are intersected with the media logic and affordances of tumblr, conversations become complex, textually layered and use a variety of technological expressions, and, as such, these conversations become mediatized.

The article uses gossiping about Angelina Jolie on two different celebrity entertainment news sites in order to propose a contextual understanding of online gossip/talk. A contextual reading explains differences between types of talk on the sites in view of the different affordances of the sites, the sites’ particular profiles, the particular invitations to gossip (often in the form of paparazzi photographs), and the different types of users taking part in the discussions. The article discusses the two sites and argues that gossip on one site resembles oral gossip and is performed by a random group of visitors whereas on the other site, Jolie fans perform a double move when talking about Jolie: on the one hand they elevate her and on the other hand they include her in their extended family.

This article presents a study of the Danish phone-in radio programme Tværs over the 1973–1996 period, during which Tværs was a part of the popular youth programme P4 i P1. It explores the character of talk on Tværs with a focus on the way talk was enabled or disabled. The study is based on a large sample comprising 167.5 hours of audio material from P4 i P1. A curated selection of empirical material from the sample, in which distinctive enablers and disablers for talk on Tværs were displayed, was chosen through systematic coding. In a qualitative analysis of this range of examples from Tværs’ mediated telephone conversations, the study identifies four main enablers/disablers for talk on Tværs (the host, the telephone, time and distance) and explores the conditions for listener access to the phone-in as shaped by these factors. Additionally, the article critically questions these conditions in relation to Tværs’ own self-understanding as presented by its hosts Tine Bryld and Emil Klausbøl.

User interaction with radio and television programmes is not a new thing. However, with new cross-media production concepts such as X Factor and Voice, this is changing dramatically. The second-screen logic of these productions encourages viewers, along with TV’s traditional one-way communication mode, to communicate on interactive (dialogue-enabling) devices such as laptops, smartphones and tablets. Using the TV show Voice as our example, this article shows how the technological and situational set-up of the production invites viewers to engage in new ways of interaction and communication. More specifically, the article demonstrates how online comments posted on the day of Voice’s 2012 season finale can be grouped into four basic action types: (1) Invitation to consume content, (2) Request for participation, (3) Request for collaboration and (4) Online commenting. These action types express on the one hand the way in which Voice addresses its audience (i.e. through traditional one-way, one-to-many communication) and on the other hand the ways in which viewers respond by participating and collaborating (i.e., through two-way, one-to-one, one-to-many and many-to-many communication).