Tracing a Line from Broadcast Publics to Networked Intimacy
This structure note gathers two papers that, at first glance, sit in different corners of social-media research but converge on a shared question: how do Italians use networked platforms to negotiate what is public and what is private, and what happens to older institutions — television, friendship — when this negotiation becomes collaborative and visible to a network of others? Iannelli2015-e0818c3e and Farci2017-2a88c00e approach this question from opposite ends of the same continuum: one from the vantage of political talk shows and the “second screen,” the other from the vantage of intimate self-disclosure on Facebook. Read together, they trace an arc from institutionally-anchored audience participation toward the more diffuse, everyday practices of relational disclosure that eventually absorb and outlast the “social TV” moment.
Twitter as a Second Screen: Participation Bounded by TV Logic
Iannelli2015-e0818c3e is the paper most squarely inside the social-TV strand proper. Built on a nearly complete corpus of tweets accompanying eleven Italian political talk shows during the 2013 general election campaign, it operationalizes the hybrid-media-systems framework (Chadwick, Couldry) to ask whether Twitter genuinely opens political talk shows to audience co-authorship, or whether it merely reproduces broadcast agendas in a new register. The answer is deflationary: participation is narrow (a small fraction of the national Twitter population), broadcasters and politicians largely ignore the audience commentary streaming past them, and the dominant genres of tweeting — opinion/comment and requests for interaction — signal audience presence without audience influence. Only a residual share of tweets attempt to introduce new issues or angles. The paper’s central move is to insist that Twitter engagement during TV events must be read through television’s own logic (its calendar, its peaks, its stars) rather than as an autonomous, disruptive public sphere. This is the foundational finding of the Italian social-TV strand: audience “participation” is spontaneous and structurally unsupported, a layer of commentary running alongside broadcast rather than through it.
From Commenting on TV to Disclosing the Self: A Shift in Register
Farci2017-2a88c00e does not discuss television at all, but it inherits and extends the same underlying problem — how publicly visible, networked practices reconfigure a boundary (public/private, in one case; audience/producer, in the other) that used to be more clearly institutionally policed. Where Iannelli et al. show audiences performing spontaneous, low-influence commentary around a broadcast text, Farci and colleagues show Facebook users performing a parallel kind of spontaneous, low-visibility-but-high-skill labor: constructing intimacy collaboratively through showing rather than telling, implicit sharing, tagging, liking, and the tacit expectation that intended readers will decode what outsiders cannot. The five practices they identify are, in effect, a second-screen grammar turned inward — the same logic of publicly visible, partially coded participation that Iannelli et al. find wrapped around talk shows, here redeployed to manage friendship and romantic disclosure rather than political debate. Both papers describe audiences/users operating in “narrow” or self-selecting publics: in one case a small, vocal fraction of Twitter users shadowing a talk show; in the other, friendship circles able to decode cryptic posts meant only for them.
A Common Diagnosis: Networked Publics Without Structural Integration
The deeper continuity between the two papers is methodological and diagnostic rather than topical. Both resist treating the platform (Twitter, Facebook) as an independent variable that simply “adds” participation or intimacy to an existing practice. Iannelli2015-e0818c3e insists that TV logic still shapes what Twitter conversation looks like; Farci2017-2a88c00e insists that Facebook “intimacy” is not a technologically novel narcissism but a revival, via new means, of community-like friendship obligations theorized well before social media (Giddens, Jamieson, Chambers). Both papers, in other words, push back against technologically deterministic readings — of participatory social TV on one side, of narcissistic self-disclosure on the other — in favor of accounts where old social forms (broadcast hierarchy, friendship norms) persist and reassert themselves inside ostensibly new, networked practices.
Positioning for the Handbook/Encyclopedia Register
Taken together, these two papers mark the transition this topic is meant to capture: an earlier, TV-centered strand of Italian social-media audience research (Iannelli2015-e0818c3e, with its second-screen/hybrid-media framing) giving way to a more general theorization of networked, collaborative publicness that need not involve broadcast media at all (Farci2017-2a88c00e). Encyclopedia- and handbook-style retrospectives on “social TV” in Italy should read the two as bookends: the empirical high-water mark of Twitter-TV audience studies, and the conceptual afterlife of that same problem — public, networked, partially opaque self-presentation — once it migrates from the talk-show hashtag to the personal profile.