Social Television as a New Relationship between Conventional TV and the Audience: An Analysis of its Aims, Processes, and Results

Abstract

Social Television comes from the interaction of recent technological improvements and new communicative designs, which leads to a different relation between conventional TV and the audience. 1) The widespread use of mobile devices gives a technological support for new consumption patterns. They have a key influence on the field of communication: they change the aims, processes, and results. Thus, they have generated a truly novel communicative phenomenon. 2) New communicative designs come to play here: a) there is an evolution in the concept of programming, b) the audience has completely changed its role, and c) new preferences come from the interplay between the programming of the TV y the active and creative responses from the audience. This new communicative phenomenon of Social TV requires an adequate framework. It comes, in my judgment, from the “scientification” of a practice with the general context of communication sciences as sciences of design.