Event-as-participation: building a framework for the practice of ‘live-tweeting’ during televised public events

Abstract

Real-time commentary, also called ‘live-tweeting’, has become a widely used feature of the social networking site Twitter. Live-tweeting offers new dynamics in political communication by affording a space in which politicians, journalists, and the public alike are present while commenting on televised events in real time. Here, the social, spatial, and temporal arrangements of political communication are intermingled in a new fashion. This article presents a novel framework to theoretically conceptualize the use of live-tweeting. Drawing on the literature of ‘context collapse’ and a phenomenological perspective on media use, the concept of ‘events-as-participation’ is developed to identify a situation in which a public event is commented on online both by the participants present at the actual event and by an audience not physically present. Thus, a pluralization of the event occurs as it is experienced in situ, via broadcast and on various online platforms where new forms of interaction between those present and the audience can occur, blurring the boundaries between places, scenes, and social contexts and creating a new type of interplay between older and newer media formats.