Abstract
This article introduces quantitative reception aesthetics as a method and demonstrates how big data derived from social media services and textual analysis can be employed to uncover hitherto hidden processes of media spectatorship. It demonstrates how mixing quantitative and qualitative methods allows us to understand textual engagement and how media spectatorship evolves over time. Taking the Norwegian web series, Skam (2015–2017), as its case study, the article demonstrates how (web)television engagement on Instagram is linked to aesthetics and narrative events and how textual engagement is more universal than perhaps post-structuralist reception studies of media reception might have us believe.
Highlights
While television viewing has always been inherently social (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955), the influx of interactive media has forced us to further develop our conceptualisations of what it means to engage with a televised media text
The ‘real time’ distribution featured in the studied series meant that Skam, unlike most television, but like most social media, was unscheduled and the users never knew when new Skam-related content might be posted on the aforementioned site or the Instagram accounts of the main characters
This study suggests thattelevision engagement on Instagram is linked to aesthetics and narrative events and that textual engagement is more universal than perhaps poststructuralist reception studies has so far acknowledged
Summary
While television viewing has always been inherently social (Katz and Lazarsfeld, 1955), the influx of interactive media has forced us to further develop our conceptualisations of what it means to engage with a televised media text. This article, demonstrates how combining different methods is possible but key if we want to further our understand the growth of the audience on social media, as well as of audience engagement with television texts through such platforms.
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