Second-Screen Engagement with Chilean Political Talk Shows

The next speakers at AoIR 2016 are Daniela Ibarra Herrera and Johann W. Unger, whose focus is on second-screen engagement with Chilean political talk shows. These shows often show tweets on screen, and promote their own hashtags as a form of engagement. There are current constitutional problems in Chile, as a hangover from the Pinochet dictatorship, and there are also ongoing issues with political corruption; this means that there is considerable engagement with current political debates.

Second-screen engagement with politics points to the everyday relevance of politics, and introduces some shifts to frontstage/backstage distinctions in politics; what emerges here is a new form of digitally mediated publics that can be studied using critical discourse studies.

The present study examined this by collecting some 5,000 tweets that were hashtagged with the talk show hashtag, from October 2015. Of these, some 30 topic-related tweets were randomly selected for further detailed analysis and coding. The focus here was especially on the semiotic resources found in those tweets, including multimodal, semiotic, and intertextual elements, as well as on topics, and argumentative strategies.

More generally, the 5,000 tweets showed a clear topic clustering, interpersonal engagement, quotations across various media platforms, and a lack of dialogue. Discursive strategies included metaphors and allusions that pointed to corruption; ad hominem attacks; intertextual quotations across Twitter as well as other media platforms; and hyperlinks to external sources. In this, different shows may well generate different publics, because of the ways in which Twitter is integrated into these shows.