Online Audience Research Articles

Cross-country comparison of the esports industry in China, South Korea and Japan

China, South Korea and Japan are called ‘Big 3’ of esports in Asia based on earnings for players, online audience penetration and game revenue. This article compares the ‘Big 3’ of esports in Asia with reference to the esports development ecosystem by applying systems thinking literacy approach as the interaction of six macro systems: information and communications technology, education, social acceptance, government roles, nongovernmental organizations and industry configuration. The comparative findings consistently show the interrelatedness of six macro systems. While information and communications technology infrastructure lay the backbone of esports industry, government plays the major role in initiating the esports development and fostering collaboration with nongovernmental organizations, which further in turn stimulates social acceptance and industry configuration. To facilitate further esports growth in the other regions, the successful experience of other Asian countries should be used as reference points for policies that can reinforce and promote industry development.

Cyberformance and Children’s Theatre: a Contextual Examination of the Janelle and Joella Paradigm

This article identifies cyberspace as an alternate theatre environment for audiences to see performances. There is no doubt that the internet has had a tremendous influence on human society; the interconnectedness and easy access to information and resources which it enables is a testament to this. Theatre artists have recently tapped into cyberspace to create content for an expanding online audience. This article explores how performance can enhance children's theatre in this digital space. It examines the concept of children’s theatre and defines children-centered online content as performance. The article broadens the definition of "liveness" in cyberformance to include not just live events but also pre-recorded content that engages viewers continuously. It analyzes three videos from Janelle and Joella, two sisters addressing children's issues online. This content is positioned within the framework of children-for-adult children’s theatre and identified as cyberformance. It highlights the videos' themes and presentation styles as exemplary of children’s theatre. Also, the attributes of performance, which are interconnectedness, liveness, and engagement, were established within the Janelle and Joella children’s theatre paradigm. The article concludes on the note that cyberformance offers a veritable platform for the continuous exploration of theatre.

Learning from Practice to Teach for Practice: Reflections from a Novel Training Series for International Climate Negotiators Presentation at PON’s 40th Anniversary Symposium, December 9, 2023

Abstract Early career climate negotiators face tough challenges—with little formal authority they must exert influence in a highly formalized negotiation process that produces bad bargaining dynamics. The authors describe the process of devising a training series for such climate negotiators from underrepresented and underresourced countries. They highlight challenges they faced, and distill lessons learned. Specifically, the article explores how negotiation theory can be made useful for people who are granted little authority to negotiate creatively, how to leverage insights from senior practitioners effectively, and how to train and engage an audience online that is scattered around the world, underpaid, overworked, and dials in with bad WiFi.

Self-Presentation on Social Media: Sociological Research of Young People in the City of Split (Croatia)

Youth self-presentation represents the creative expression of personality, interests, and attitudes through the formation of an online identity on social media, which is an indispensable component of young people's lives nowadays. Just as Goffman's actor presents himself on stage in everyday life, people on social media have unique modes of expression that include filtering, editing, and selective sharing of content in order to present themselves in the best light and impress their target online audience. This sociological research aims to gain an insight into how young people present themselves to their online audience by examining why and how often they use and post on social media, as well as how they create and edit content on Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok as the most popular social media. An online survey was used in 2023 to gather data from a sample of 283 young people in Split (Croatia), who were between the ages of 20 and 34. The study's findings indicate that young people follow posts and stories of others every day and that women spend more time both following and posting content on social media than men. In comparison with Facebook and TikTok, they prefer to use Instagram. Compared to men who use social media because of its popularity or in order to make new acquaintances, women use it for entertainment (Facebook) and to follow and create content (Instagram). At the same time, women are more inclined to use various options and tools when creating and editing content on social media.

Intersectionality of Queer Female Characters in Alice Oseman’s Young Adult Series of Graphic Novels Heartstopper

The global success of Alice Oseman’s series of young adult graphic novels, Heartstopper, may come as a surprise. Initially published as a webcomic on Tumblr and Tapas, it attracted an online audience of over 50 million views. The project’s publishing fundraising goal was met in just two hours, and Hachette Children’s Group published Heartstopper: Volume One as a graphic novel in 2019, followed by four other volumes and extras, all released by 2023. While most readers and critics have focused on the issues of male homo- and bisexuality in Heartstopper, this article seeks to analyse the multifaceted identities of trans and cisgender female characters in Oseman’s graphic novel series through the lens of intersectionality, focusing on gender, sexuality, race, and ethnicity, while addressing the call for diversity in YA literature. Remembering that young adult literature often aims to raise questions about political organisation, ideal society, and the need for social change, the reading of Oseman’s Heartstopper presented in this paper argues that it is a part of utopian young adult literature due to disregarding many issues connected to the characters’ intersections, especially the experiences of women of colour.

"Oh my Dave, your face says it all!": Exploring the Multimodal Practices of Tasting in Live Streaming

Research on the activity of tasting, examined through the lens of conversation analysis, reveals that in face-to-face contexts, tasting is an interactive and sequential process that combines individual sensory experience with a public, witnessable, accountable, and intersubjective dimension. This perspective can be extended to the realm of live-streamed tasting, where streamers demonstrate and communicate the taste of food products to online audiences in real time. By adopting multimodal conversation analysis to scrutinize the unfolding sequence moment by moment, my study aims to demonstrate 1) Three practices to achieve the configuration of "tasting heads," wherein the current taster's face is displayed on-screen. 2) Patterns of gaze withdrawal from the screen and subsequent gaze back to the screen during the tasting process. 3) The performative and animated facial expressions. 4) The structure of responses from both streamers and viewers after the tasting.

Transnational queer cultures and digital media: an introduction

Abstract Queer cultures have long been transnational and in times of rapid technological advancements, large migration flows, and intense cross-cultural exchanges, queer connections are evolving in new forms and meanings. These developments occur at the intersection of various intertwined geopolitical scales: urban, regional, national, continental, and global, as well as physical and digital. This introduction synthesizes various theoretical and methodological discussions to highlight the ambivalences of contemporary queer cultures, focusing on their intrinsic transnational and digital conditions. The authors contributing to this issue demonstrate that understanding queer cultures in the digital age requires examining the roles of various actors, including big tech employees, online platform volunteers, queer influencers, audiences, and migrants. They also highlight how queer digital cultures transcend national borders and challenge oppositional binaries, such as local vs. global and the West vs. the Rest, all while maintaining a critical perspective on the ambivalences of digitality.

Examining how emotions affect online audience retention: Empirical evidence from livestreaming electronic commerce platforms

The retention of audiences has become a pressing issue in the paradigm of livestreaming electronic commerce. Embracing the cognitive appraisal theory of emotions, this study develops a research model to gauge the relationship between emotion and audience retention. The results from 1,218,692 bullet comments from 491,348 users in 946 livestreaming sessions indicate that users’ valence and arousal affect retention positively, while the two dimensions of streamers’ emotions exert impacts in opposite directions. We further discover that intimacy has significant moderating effects in the research model. These findings emphasize the importance of understanding emotional dynamics in LSE in promoting audience retention.

An Approach of Query Audience's Attention in Virtual Speech.

Virtual speeches are a very popular way for remote multi-user communication, but it has the disadvantage of the lack of eye contact. This paper proposes the evaluation of an online audience attention based on gaze tracking. Our research only uses webcams to capture the audience's head posture, gaze time, and other features, providing a low-cost method for attention monitoring with reference values across multiple domains. Meantime, we also propose a set of indexes which can be used to evaluate the audience's degree of attention, making up for the fact that the speaker cannot gauge the audience's concentration through eye contact during online speeches. We selected 96 students for a 20 min group simulation session and used Spearman's correlation coefficient to analyze the correlation between our evaluation indicators and concentration. The result showed that each evaluation index has a significant correlation with the degree of attention (p = 0.01), and all the students in the focused group met the thresholds set by each of our evaluation indicators, while the students in the non-focused group failed to reach the standard. During the simulation, eye movement data and EEG signals were measured synchronously for the second group of students. The EEG results of the students were consistent with the systematic evaluation. The performance of the measured EEG signals confirmed the accuracy of the systematic evaluation.

Indifferent About Online Traffic: The Posting Strategies of Five News Outlets During Musk’s Acquisition of Twitter

ABSTRACT This study examines the publication strategies of legacy news outlets on Twitter following the company’s acquisition by Elon Musk. We used SCImago Media Rankings to identify the news organizations with the highest online audiences, namely The Guardian, The New York Times, USA Today, The Independent, and The Washington Post. Data was acquired through the Twitter Academic API v2 and the SEMrush platform at the beginning of 2023 and covers all of 2022. The database includes website audits that monitor the web traffic of a domain, with the aggregate data subsequently processed using R packages and Atlas.ti. Our analyses show that a higher presence on Twitter leads to a substantive increase in social traffic, as seen with The Independent. This is in sharp contrast to the other news outlets. These differences remain irrespective of their topical news coverage, broadly focused on the Russo-Ukrainian war, or compositional feature in their messages, which largely lack typical Twitter features like hashtags and @-mentions. We conclude our analysis by discussing the communication strategies of news organizations on Twitter following the company’s acquisition by Elon Musk in 2022.

From innovation to participation: connectivity and the conduct of contemporary warfare

Abstract The war in Ukraine is the first conventional war to ever take place in an entirely connected information ecology. The internet has not been switched off. Mundane smart devices are ubiquitous. Soldiers and ordinary civilians are participating in the conflict in ways that have never previously been possible. This stretches participation beyond the information domain and the kinds of connectivity that shaped conflicts in places like Syria, Tigray and Mali. Now the smartphone is routinely being used by soldiers and civilians alike to geolocate enemy columns, control drones to range find for artillery, and produce and broadcast the damage assessment for online audiences to watch. Surveillance technology already makes it possible to track individual smartphone users. In times of peace these forms of surveillance are curtailed. During a conventional war, however, private organizations and governments have reason to circumvent peacetime legal conventions. The result is that mundane connected technology forms part of an extended chain of sensors that feeds data and information to those involved in information warfare and targeting activities. In effect, the smartphone has collapsed the means to fight and represent war into the functionality of one device. This article maps the policy and military implications of these developments in relation to participation, the conduct of war and the law of armed conflict.

Temporality of online reactions to fictional characters’ death

In the digital era, online reactions to broadcast media are an important feature of audience engagement. Although central, the question of the temporality of audience online reactions has been understudied. We investigate this question by exploring the temporal patterns of online reactions to fictional characters’ deaths. More than 3,500 forum reactions to Game of Thrones characters’ deaths were collected over 5 years. Temporal patterns of reactions to expected deaths displayed more long-term patterns, while reactions to unexpected deaths displayed more spontaneous patterns. These results further our understanding of death reactions’ temporality in cyberspace, in a multimedia and transmedia storytelling context.

Iran, Religious Agents, and the People: Voices from Khuzestan

ABSTRACT This article explores the significance of popular religious agents in Iran, focusing on the maddāḥān (eulogists) and their role in the Ashura processions, in the context of Iran’s ethnic minorities, looking into the unique case-study of Khuzestan. To comprehend the contemporary relevance of Ashura, this study utilizes social media, employing a hermeneutical approach to videography. The maddāḥān played a pivotal role in promoting a unifying Shiʿi and revolutionary ethos through their meticulously crafted videos and their widespread dissemination, fostering a sense of solidarity with the Islamic republic and its message of resilience. Their contribution was significant among ethnic minorities, given their numerous grievances toward the regime. The maddāḥān also played a vital role in creating space for local expressions of mourning, enhancing a unique Khuzestani identity deeply tied to its Arab tradition, but also open to multiple influences. Their emotionally charged sessions and direct engagement with the people contributed to a strong sense of connections between the maddāḥān and their extensive online audience. This popular appeal complements the established clerical authority structure but also poses a significant challenge to the formal religious hierarchy, as the maddāḥān’s approach resonates more closely with the lived experiences and cultural realities of their followers.

Directives and references in selected coronavirus-motivated internet memes

Abstract The use of directives in communicating the nature of the pandemic and reference to social experiences were promoted using images on social media platforms. The images or memes are used to create awareness and reinforce the criteria for safety during the pandemic. Previous studies on internet memes have concentrated on humor generation, speaker-hearer shared knowledge, neologism, and multimodality among others, with insufficient attention paid to the use of directives and references in such coronavirus-motivated memes. This paper, therefore, examines how directives and references are employed in conveying expected social responsibilities through coronavirus-motivated internet memes in Nigeria and other socio-cultural contexts. For data, one hundred coronavirus-motivated memes were purposively selected from Facebook, and eight representative memes were subjected to pragmatic analysis using aspects of Jacob Mey’s (2001. Pragmatics: An introduction, 2nd edn. USA: Blackwell Publishing) pragmatic acts theory to unearth insights from them. The paper observes that the various spheres of life that are relatable to an online audience help to express what the pandemic is about and enhance the meaning of the pandemic with the context of the use of the memes, giving clearer perspectives on the pandemic. Directives and references are useful tools for conveying social responsibilities to online audience.

Deep Learning Social Filtering Model for Event Recommendation Services

In the contemporary time, technology has made the determination and discovery of human preferences, priorities and personal inclinations possible through the use of recommender systems. Activities of users on the internet can be monitored, extracted, stored, analyzed and used by the recommender systems for suggesting future events to users on the web. This paper aims at developing and analyzing a model for event services recommendation for visitors to events. Event seekers, organizers and event service providers get notified, plan and book for upcoming events from their comfort zones without hassles of gallivanting nooks and crannies to enquire about prospective events. There is not any compelling need to interface with under-enthusiasts and intermediaries in the course of organizing, visiting and providing services for an event. However, it is obvious that massive amount of available information on the web exhibit frustrating attributes, hence it is increasingly a difficult task for users to find the content of interest; in other words, a huge chunk of information undiscovered on the network is left behind as “dark information”. In context, event service recommendation uses deep learning social filtering base techniques which adopt similarity computation measures with a bias for Pearson correlation coefficient, cosine similarity, and Euclidean similarity to recommend related and most relevant events/services to the targeted online audience. In this paper, the aim is to develop a deep learning model which integrates social filtering technique for enhancing the quality of event recommendation for users. A model based on the deep learning algorithm of multilayered perceptron and Neural Collaborative Filtering is proposed for event recommender services. The results from various simulations using meetup website dataset shows that the proposed model performs better than other techniques. The results yield 70% accuracy, 66% precision and 98% recall.

The influence of social media use on corporate reputation at a higher education institution

The use of social media in organisations can assist in the creation and maintenance of a good brand, reputation and image largely due to the potential of developing interactive relationships with various stakeholders. This not only aids in building stakeholder relationships, but also in increasing an organisation’s visibility. The aim of this research was to assess how a higher education institution, specifically the Durban University of Technology (DUT) in South Africa, uses social media platforms to build and maintain a positive corporate reputation. Additionally, the research examined how the institution actively engages with their target audience on social media platforms. A quantitative methodology was adopted with a sample population of 180 students from the DUT. Data was collected through the distribution of questionnaires to students and analysed using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 25.0. Findings revealed that social media plays an important role for organisations as a vital tool to build and maintain corporate reputation online, as well as communicating effectively and actively with various target audiences. The research recommends that organisations prioritise investing in social media platforms and communicate effectively and actively with their audiences online.

Explaining the gift-giving intentions of live-streaming audiences through social presence: the perspective of interactive marketing

PurposeLive streaming has become an extremely popular form of online service and allows live audiences to give virtual gifts or money to their favorite streamers. This study aims to investigate the impact of the audience's multidimensional social presence on their attitudes toward live streamers and intentions to give money or gifts to streamers, based on the interactive marketing perspective. This study considers live audiences' gift-giving intentions by integrating the theory of multidimensional social presence, which includes awareness, cognitive social presence and affective social interaction, and the theory of reasoned action (TRA).Design/methodology/approachThis study invited audiences who had watched live streaming from several popular live-streaming platforms to respond to a web questionnaire. The unit of analysis was at the individual level. This study applied the purposive sampling technique for data collection. A sample of 258 eligible responses to the online survey was analyzed using SPSS software and the causal relationships between the measurement variables of this research model were verified through structural equation modeling.FindingsThe results indicate that the audiences' awareness of participating in live streaming enhanced their cognitive and affective social presence, which positively affected their attitudes toward live streamers. These attitudes had a further significant effect on their gift-giving intentions. Cognitive social presence and affective social presence were found to play significant mediating roles in the relationship between awareness and attitudes toward live streamers.Originality/valueThis study examines audiences' intention to give gifts to their favorite live streamers, based on the interactive marketing perspective. The interactive relationship between live streamers and online audiences is developed by audience members through the process of inner psychological transformation, which is measured through the multidimensional construct of social presence. This occurs through a mutual influence relationship in which awareness simultaneously influences cognitive social presence and affective social presence, and cognitive social presence impacts affective social presence.Research limitations/implicationsThe study contributes three noteworthy findings to the theory development through the integrated perspective of the TRA and the theory of social presence. (1) Exploring the influence of belief factors on internal psychological responses and intention in live streaming to expand an innovative application of the TRA. (2) Adopting the multidimensional social presence can help researchers more clearly describe various live-streaming situations and extend the research scope of the social presence theory to live-streaming interactive marketing strategies. (3) From the perspective of live-streamer marketing, this study broadens the research fields of electronic commerce and interactive marketing.Practical implicationsThis study provides four practical implications for platform managers and live streamers. (1) To induce favorable attitudes toward live streamers, live streamers initiate various interactive activities sequentially to establish a social presence with the audience. (2) Live streamers should devote themselves to forming a joyful atmosphere for their followers, as this will trigger audiences' affective social presence to generate positive attitudes and increase followers' intentions. (3) To attract and retain young followers, live streamers must devise interesting content and provide fresh services. (4) Platform managers must create useful widgets to assist live streamers in managing their channels and followers.Social implicationsBuilding friendly real-time interaction between the live streamer and the audience is an important task in live streaming and further influences the income of the live streamer and the platform. The study provides an effective approach to building friendly real-time interaction for the live streamer and manager of live-streaming electronic commerce through the interactive marketing perspective. The approach can help the live streamer manage nice communication with their audience and obtain virtual money and gift-giving from the audience.

Membangun Kapasitas UMKM dalam Pemasaran Digital di Desa Wisata Way Tebing Cepa

The Covid-19 pandemic has severely hampered the expansion of the world economy, including Indonesia. In the midst of this challenging situation, businesses are being forced to innovate and fight for their survival. On a positive note, the rapid advancement of digital technology has opened up new opportunities for MSMEs to market their products to a wider audience online. This allows MSMEs to reach a broader market and increase sales. However, to fully capitalize on these opportunities, MSMEs need to improve their human resources (HR) and information technology (IT) capabilities. This is crucial to help them adapt to the various new technologies emerging in the era of Industry 4.0. The government has high hopes for MSMEs to become major players in the development of Indonesia's digital economy. MSME empowerment can be achieved by assisting them in gaining access to finance and ensuring that their products are of sufficient quality to compete in the market. This can increase investor confidence in MSMEs and open up funding opportunities. To enter the online business, MSMEs need to make improvements in several areas, such as product quality, product standardization, HR development, and access to financing. Collaboration between the government and e-commerce platforms is essential to support MSMEs in utilizing digital technology and developing their online businesses. As a commitment to helping MSMEs, Universitas MItra Indonesia is conducting a community service activity with the theme "Building MSME Capacity in Digital Marketing in Way Tebing Cepa Kalianda Tourism Village". This activity is being held in Taman Baru Village, Penengahan District, South Lampung Regency. This activity's primary goal is to teach and advise MSMEs in the community on how to use social media to market their goods and services.

The Same Views, the Same News? A 15-Country Study on News Sharing on Social Media by European Politicians

The Same Views, the Same News? A 15-Country Study on News Sharing on Social Media by European Politicians

Social media: a digital social mirror for identity development during adolescence

According to recent studies, social media are settings where adolescents construct their identities while engaging in social interactions. In digital spaces, adolescents can interact with, display, and receive feedback about themselves, contributing to the development of a clear and integrated sense of self. This paper reviews the available empirical evidence and discusses four overarching themes related to identity construction in social media: self-presentation (attempting to control images of self to others), social comparison (compare themselves with others, especially evaluating the self), role model (media figures that are social references for behavior), and online audience (friends, peers, unknow/know referents with whom users may interact online). Moreover, it proposes a new contextual perspective on identity development on social media. Informed by research on these themes that social media features allow adolescents to perform self-presentations, offering the opportunity to express interests, ideas, and beliefs about themselves (identification and role exploration). The image presented on social media exposes them to feedback, online audiences, and social comparison with peers or social models. Audiences have an impact on how adolescents think about themselves (self-concept validation). Role models can facilitate the learning of behaviors through imitation and identification (exploration and commitment). Thus, the digital world provides a context for the development of adolescents’ personal identity. This proposal aims to contribute to the construction of future theories on identity in social media and advance this area of research.