New COST special issue: New media, audience and emotional connectivity

New media, audience and emotional connectivity
Edited by Hada M. Sánchez Gonzales
Sociedad de la Información
Nr. 44, 2013

Free download at:
http://www.sociedadelainformacion.com/cost_2013/specialissue_44.pdf

This special issue is resulting from the work of the Working Group 2 on “Audience interactivity and participation” of the COST Action IS0906 “Transforming Audiences, Transforming Societies”. COST is an intergovernmental framework for European Cooperation in Science and Technology, allowing the coordination of nationally-funded research at the European level.

The special issue seeks to highlight the existence of an audience turned into "media watchdogs" that exercises control over the quality of traditional media. It has gone from being an ignored mass to become an intelligent crowd and the fifth power. They have a more proactive role in the construction of information in social and public agenda. They want the true information and they decide on what they want to be informed and what they want to report. Journalism is not exempt from the innovations offered by the Web 2.0 ecosystem. Traditional media are readjusting to the demands of the audience, new media journalistic narratives, multiplatform and transmedia requirements taking place in cyberspace; journalists do the same, they are facing new challenges for professionals arised from new media on the Internet.
New media have some special features that tighten the relationship between the journalist, the source of information and the audience. “It's a tactic characterized by the absence of physical proximity”, which allows direct contact with people and provides a different picture to the information published regularly in the media” (Sánchez y Méndez, 2013:136). Similarly, it enables multidirectional communication and closeness with the prosumer (public). It is arguably the clearest demonstration of emotional democratization of information. These are new ways of narrating the information without “compromising quality, which is the best guarantee of survival of our profession” (San Martín, 2012: 7).
The audience participation is essential in journalism, hence the need to study the emotional connection developed between the audience and the journalist wich enables joint work, commitment and mutual identification rooted in valuable content, generation of feelings associated with certain values, empathy, service orientation, establishing links with others, organizational awareness, collaboration, etc., especially when the progress of the Social Web has only just begun. Social media channels have become mediators of sharing those emotional meanings that establish an effective relationship with the audience and with it, new consumer environments.

Contents

New media, audience and emotional connectivity (Introducción)
Hada M. Sánchez Gonzales

Political infotainment and emotional connectivity on YouTube
Salomé Berrocal Gonzalo and Eva Campos-Domínguez

Digital enthymeme: moral irresponsibility, emotions and materialism in new media discourse
Maria Eronen

The radio university as a public service: Programming models in Spain
Paloma Contreras Pulido and José Ignacio Aguaded Gómez

Online Interconnectivity and Negative Emotion Patterning
Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk

New connectivity between audience and mass media: An emperical analysis of interactivity in the Spanish digital press
Joan Francesc Fondevila Gascón, Ana Beriain Bañares and Josep Lluís del Olmo Arriaga

From Audience to Community: The Role of The Affective Factors and the relationship between audience and newspaper staff in the process of its successful transformation towards presence
Emilia Smolak-Lozano

Phenomenological features of digital communication: interactivity, immersion and ubiquity
Carmen Marta Lazo, José Antonio Gabelas Barroso and Elisa Hergueta Covacho

Redefinition of the Relationship Between Media and Audience(s) in the digital context: The Guardian's open journalism model
Moisés Limia Fernández

The segmentation of the media space in accordance with axiological paradigm
María Pilgún

Towards the construction of new audiences “Fictions” in contemporary media
Carolina Duek