"I've been manipulated!":designing second screen experiences for critical viewing of reality TV

The recent proliferation of a reality TV genre that focusses on welfare recipients has led to concerns that prime-time media experiences are exacerbating misconceptions, and stifling critical debate, around major societal issues such as welfare reform and poverty. Motivated by arguments that ‘second screening’ practices offer opportunities to engage viewers with issues of political concern, we describe the design and evaluation of two smartphone apps that facilitate and promote more critical live-viewing of reality TV. Our apps, Spotting Guide and Moral Compass, encourage users to identify, categorise, tag and filter patterns and tropes within reality TV, as well as reinterpret social media posts associated with their broadcast. We show that such interactions encourage critical thinking around typical editing and production techniques and foster co-discussion and reflection amongst viewers. We discuss, more broadly, how these interactions encourage users to identify the wider consequences and framings of reality TV, and offer implications and considerations for design that provokes criticality and reflection in second screening contexts

How to conduct sociolinguistic research in online public video

There has been an increase in the sharing of video, and thus speech, in social media. Yet research has focused on written language. Considering our communications are continually becoming more computer-mediated, researching of the impact of such interaction contexts upon our speech is overdue. In this thesis I ask, “how can we conduct sociolinguistic research in online public video?”. Sociolinguistics is the study of the interplay between social factors and speech. Four key aspects that construct a sociolinguistic research method are identified - i) Formulating Research Questions, ii) Ethics, iii) Selecting Linguistic Variables, and iv) Statistical Analysis - and theorised in relation to online public video research. A case study is used as a vehicle through which the research practices of these four key aspects are explored. The case study asks, “Is speech influenced by written comments in online public video?”. YouTube is rationalised as an interaction context where explicit feedback is received via viewer comments, but who is commenting is ambiguous. Hence, the sociolinguistic theory under examination is Audience Design which assumes intraspeaker variation is an automatic response to one’s audience. It is hypothesised that a YouTuber will adjust their speech as they gain information about their audience via the comments. This thesis reports on the quantitative analysis of comments and the speech variable uptalk, as well as an online ethnography that motivates the quantitative analysis of a second speech variable, word-medial trochaic /t/. The relationship between the comments and speech appears to be dependent upon the YouTuber’s career stage and their engagement with the comments. The contributions of this thesis are illustrating the value of considering speech when researching social media, and defining resources to guide sociolinguistically-aligned research in online public video