The Revolution Will Be Televised: Identifying, Organizing, and Presenting Correlations Between Social Media and Broadcast Television

Many popular facets of live information, known collectively as communication technology, deliver ongoing, socially-relevant narrations of our world. Traditionally, different types of communication media were considered to be in competition, but recently they have been discovered to be complementary and synergistic. This paper will concentrate on the role, influence, and potential of the integration of various types of communication media with particular attention to the recent phenomenon of social media and broadcast television.

This research demonstrates how to develop a listening platform that enables one to capture, parse, analyze, cluster and present correlations between social media and broadcast television. The listening platform, called LiveDash for this research, uses a number of innovative media real-time media capturing, link analysis, clustering, and social networking analysis techniques to provide an immediate system of record of what is being mentioned on television, social networks, and journalism wires. Using media servers designed specifically for this project, LiveDash captures and records all national television channels from the United States, and incrementally indexes what is said on Broadcast Television in real-time. LiveDash also crawls the links people share on Twitter, Digg, and other social sharing services, and indexes the content on those pages as soon as they are shared, allowing users to find the newest, most socially-relevant content in real-time.

Due to this sophisticated system, it is now possible to identify and comprehend the correlations of information between social media and broadcast television. Moreover, by conducting annual surveys and user experience research, this research explores the simultaneous usage of social media and broadcast television by users. With over two million unique visits to Livedash.com last year alone, this research demonstrates that not only are users increasingly using social media and broadcast television simultaneously, but also value interactivity and contextual, correlated information to augment their broadcast television experience. LiveDash and its mobile device component, LiveDash Mobile, show how users react, process, and value additional computer recommended social media while watching broadcast television. A REST API for the LiveDash system has also been made available for academic uses and further research.