[1] In 2014, Ellen DeGeneres helped generate a viral moment by tweeting a selfie of herself with other celebrities at the 86th Academy Awards. This tweet illustrates the fraught yet collaborative relationship between the television and technology industries as they employed strategies to shift traditional viewing habits toward a "multi-screen participatory experience accentuating the immediacy of live television" (Barker 2022, 4). This introductory case frames Cory Barker's Social TV: Multi-screen Content and Ephemeral Culture with the promise—and failure—of "a social TV revolution in the 2010s" (5). Building on a range of scholarship—from Raymond Williams's (1990) conceptualizations of liveness and flow, to Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin's (1999) theory of remediation, to John T. Caldwell's (2003) mapping of "second-shift aesthetics," and even to Paul Grainge's (2011) scholarship on ephemeral media—Barker's capture of Social TV as a "micro-history" illuminates the manner in which the media industries "constituted—and later discarded and transformed" Social TV to "propagate a default viewer orientation of collective, unified, and engaged fandom" (16).
[2] Indeed, Barker engages with fan and audience scholars, as the imperatives of the industries—both television and technology—understand fandom as a "default position" of active viewership, highlighting "good fans [who] consume content at industry-approved times, on industry-approved platforms, and within industry-approved contexts" (18). This positioning of the engaged-viewer-as-fan serves as a consistent theme throughout Barker's text, particularly in the industries' attempts to rehabilitate a common and unified viewership in the midst of technological and sociocultural shifts. Barker is sure to note that while many fan identities and behaviors are prevalent outside of the scope of the strategies adopted, Social TV focuses on the way "Hollywood and Silicon Valley have appropriated fandom as the norm for all audiences, no matter how active or attentive they are" (20).
[3] Ultimately, Social TV faded by the end of the 2010s. As the television industry moved forward and either discarded or repurposed its technological tools and platforms, Barker relied on his "personal activity, along with [his] curated archives of digital material now exiled amid corporate restrategizing or restructuring" in conjunction with "press coverage, publicity material, second-screen content, social platform interfaces, television episodes, and viewer participation," to produce a rich discursive analysis of the television and technology industries across the decade (16). Thus, Social TV speaks to a range of media and technology scholars, particularly those invested in television theory in the digital age, the narratives of the media industries, and the subject-position of the viewer-as-fan within those narratives.
[4] Social TV comprises five chapters, each using a case study to focus on different sectors of the television and technology industries' interplay during the 2010s. The case studies are not presented in chronological fashion; rather, Barker emphasizes the simultaneity of these case studies as they impacted—and were impacted by—each other during a period in which the two industries held "a persistent message of fan empowerment" in their myriad strategies (20). The first two chapters unpack social strategies employed by legacy television networks (ABC and AMC, respectively), while the third and fourth chapters investigate the practices of technology companies, such as check-in start-up platforms GetGlue, Miso, and Viggle, as well as Amazon Studios, as they attempted to disrupt traditional television viewing with enhanced and incentivized experiences. The final chapter illuminates how HBO used Twitter to diversify its engagement with audiences while maintaining a legacy position in a crowded streaming ecology. Barker concludes his text with a look at the production and distribution of original video content on social media platforms as a way to remediate television practices into a unified Social TV experience.
[5] Beginning with organic tweets from showrunner Shonda Rhimes and Scandal (2012–2018) star Kerry Washington in 2012, chapter 1 traces the trajectory of ABC's Twitter-infused campaign to secure a consistent live viewership for its weekly #TGIT programming block—populated by Grey's Anatomy (2005–), Scandal, and How to Get Away with Murder (2014–2020). By reminding viewers not to miss out on inciting incidents in their favorite programs nor tweets from their favorite stars, ABC constructed what Barker refers to as a simulated liveness and flow of broadcast television, especially as it "tried to reinforce the immediacy of broadcasting, where liveness and flow directed audience attention across act breaks, episodes, and most crucially, screens" (27). While ABC's coordinated campaign eventually wore off, #TGIT offered a glimpse into a "strategically cooperative flow" in which "the aura of liveness" remained the core of the enhanced multiscreen experience—particularly as streaming technologies and cultures began to dominate the media industries (55).
[6] While ABC used Twitter to simulate liveness and flow across its #TGIT programming, AMC developed Story Sync, "a branded two-screen experience" accessible on mobile devices, as a means to deliver supplementary content to viewers watching its programs (21)—with the most content and engagement available only when episodes aired live. Borrowing logics from DVD special features as well as multiplatform and transmedia storytelling, Story Sync offered a promise "to expand a franchise's storyworld outward in perpetuity, underlining linkages across platforms, formats, and histories, by asking fans to drill inward, into its story and themes" (60, emphasis in original). But AMC prioritized Story Sync as a guide for fans to engage in what Barker refers to as synchronized reiteration, or approved readings of ideologies, themes, and character actions in a particular series. Due to AMC's stronghold on the gamified options and control of fan navigation within Story Sync, the product offered little in live social conversations—a core aspect of ABC's success, as outlined in chapter 1—and ultimately failed to deliver the "social" aspect of Social TV.
[7] Chapter 3 shifts from television networks establishing social components as part of their engagement strategies to the technology industry's attempts to gamify and incentivize television viewing. Looking at a collection of start-ups—GetGlue, Miso, and Viggle—Barker offers social productivity as a lens through which to analyze the corporate conflation of gift and commodity economies. While fans could check in to television programs in a manner akin to Foursquare in the early 2010s, corporate imperatives—through their financial support of these start-ups—enacted what Barker refers to as a reward economy in which the social productivity of fans was explicitly rewarded based on their consumption habits. As was the case with Twitter and Story Sync, these start-ups aimed to "monetize second-screen experiences and the social dimensions of television" through the collection of user data and their partnerships with corporate sponsors (92). This initiative eventually failed, as the rewards were not enough to break through the crowded ecology of Social TV players vying for user attention.
[8] As perhaps the most interwoven strategy between the television and technology industries, Amazon's Pilot Season is the focus of the fourth chapter. A means to showcase original pilots for viewer review and word-of-mouth marketing through Amazon's interface, Pilot Season originally invited those outside of typical Hollywood circles of professionals to submit works in progress and partake in feedback with more established industry insiders. Yet, as Barker notes, this initiative pivoted quickly toward a branding of quality and prestige programming, leaving amateur media makers out of the pipeline despite the company's initial messaging. Indeed, through the guise of Social TV strategies, "Amazon Studios remained strategically silent about the precise influence of feedback," pulling back any indication that viewer feedback amounted to credible decision-making at the corporate giant (125).
[9] By the latter half of the 2010s, two major shifts had occurred: streaming media companies began to invest heavily in original productions, and the Twitter platform shifted into a "complicated space of sociopolitical tension" (145). Legacy media players (e.g., HBO) and social media platforms (i.e., Twitter and Facebook) take center stage in chapter 5 alongside the conclusion as Barker interrogates the process of Twitter's sociality separating "brand building from the primetime schedule and integrat[ing] it into the rhythms of everyday life" (145). As pointed out in this chapter, amid a rise in Netflix's cultural cache (and spending on original content), HBO adopted a strategy of platform authenticity to court social media users and cord-cutters "by expanding its identity from a prestigious television network to an omnipresent multiplatform content machine" (147). This can be seen in HBO's expansion into streaming with HBO Now in 2015 as well as HBO Twitter's "reformulated approach to social branding" (148). Similarly, Twitter and Facebook invested in original video content—a shift from assisting television networks in promoting viewership for their own content to hosting content on their own respective platforms. Perhaps as a signal to the fraying relationship that bound Social TV, Barker notes the distinctive efforts of this remediation-legitimation cycle by the technology industry to favor "video over television, and…subscribers over viewers"—even as many of the previous strategies analyzed throughout the text failed (179, emphasis in original).
[10] Ultimately, Barker delivers a substantial analysis of the intersection between Hollywood and Silicon Valley during the 2010s. As a historicization of an ephemeral culture, Social TV offers a deep, critical understanding of the media industries in flux—beneficial for those interested in the relationship between the industries, their viewers, and users, as well as the dynamics of power and agency within a hyper-corporate ecology. Barker's incisive account of Social TV not only highlights the impacts of successful strategies on their respective industries but also contextualizes ephemeral failures before materials disappear, emphasizing that a historical study on Social TV "from beginning to end also reveals how media strategy progresses through forgotten experiments, as failures still generate widely embraced ideas in the future" (15). Barker's crucial linkages to many disciplines housed in media and technology studies document industrial shifts that may be obscured by press coverage and corporate archiving of materials. Those invested in the study of fans and audiences will find this text helpful in understanding the point of view that media and technology industry players have regarding viewers and their engagement with media artifacts and practices. Given the ongoing changes in both realms (including but not limited to corporate restructuring, ownership transitions, and viewership shifts), Social TV presents a strong starting point for those wishing to further explore the relationship between the media and technology industries in the twenty-first century.