This article argues that the live tweeting of reality television allows the creation of an imagined community, bounded by national borders. In an era of audience fragmentation and time-shifting of television engagement, live reality television encourages audiences to watch at time of broadcast; this is amplified by the move of some audience members to live-tweet the broadcast, communicating amongst themselves within a dispersed backchannel. A crucial result of the digital conversation is to reinstate the importance of the nation as a space for the reading and reception of culture. The article utilizes a discursive analysis of the concurrent Twitter conversation around the second season of The X Factor NZ in New Zealand in order to highlight the ongoing role that is played by the nation as a cultural formation in such discussions, as well as the ways that it makes understandings of national cultural identity visible.
AndersonB (2006) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised. London: Verso.
2.
BarkerC (1997) Global Television: An Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers.
3.
BeedenAde BruinJ (2010) The Office: Articulations of national identity in television format adaptation. Television & New Media11(1): 3–19, doi: 10.1177/1527476409338197.
4.
BennettL (2012) Transformations through Twitter: The England riots, television viewership and negotiations of power through media convergence. Participations: The International Journal of Audience and Reception Studies9: 511–525.
5.
BruunH (2016) The qualitative interview in media production studies. In: PatersonCLeeDSahaA, et al. (eds) Advancing Media Production Research: Shifting Sites, Methods, and Politics. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 131–146.
6.
CameronJGeidnerN (2014) Something old, something new, something borrowed from something blue: Experiments on dual viewing TV and Twitter. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media58(3): 400–419, doi: 10.1080/08838151.2014.935852.
7.
DayanD (2001) The peculiar public of television. Media, Culture & Society23(6): 743–765, doi: 10.1177/016344301023006004.
8.
DayanDKatzE (1992) Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
9.
EvansE (2015) Layering engagement: The temporal dynamics of transmedia television. Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies7(2): 111–128.
10.
FiskeJ (1992) Audiencing: A cultural studies approach to watching television. Poetics21(4): 345–359, doi: 10.1016/0304-422X(92)90013-S.
11.
FreelonDKarpfD (2015) Of big birds and bayonets: Hybrid Twitter interactivity in the 2012 presidential debates. Information, Communication & Society18(4): 390–406, doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2014.952659.
HannerzUGingrichA (eds) (2017) Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilities. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
14.
HarringtonS (2014) Tweeting about the Telly: Live TV, audiences, and social media. In: WellerKBrunsABurgessJ, et al. (eds) Twitter and Society. New York: Peter Lang.
15.
HarringtonSHighfieldTBrunsA (2013) More than a backchannel: Twitter and television. Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies10(1): 405–409.
16.
HartleyJ (2000) The television live event: From the ‘Wandering Booby’ to the ‘Death of History’. In: TurnerGCunninghamS (eds) The Australian TV Book. St Leonards, NSW: Allen and Unwin, pp. 155–169.
17.
HartleyJ (2008) Television Truths. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
18.
HassounD (2014) Tracing attentions: Toward an analysis of simultaneous media use. Television & New Media15(4): 271–288, doi: 10.1177/1527476412468621.
19.
HighfieldTHarringtonSBrunsA (2013) Twitter as a technology for audiencing and fandom: The Eurovision phenomenon. Information, Communication & Society16(3): 315–339.
20.
HooperC (2016) Personal Correspondence between Chris Hooper and author.
21.
JiQRaneyAA (2015) Morally judging entertainment: A case study of live tweeting during Downton Abbey. Media Psychology18(2): 221–242, doi: 10.1080/15213269.2014.956939.
22.
KavkaMWestA (2004) Temporalities of the real: Conceptualising time in reality TV. In: Understanding Reality Television. London: Routledge, pp. 136–153.
23.
KingM (1991) Pakeha: The Quest for Identity in New Zealand. Auckland, NZ: Penguin.
24.
LeeHJAndrejevicM (2014) Second-screen theory: From the democratic surround to the digital enclosure. In: HoltJSansonK (eds) Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming and Sharing Media in the Digital Era. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, pp. 41–61.
25.
LinY-RKeeganBMargolinD, et al. (2014) Rising tides or rising stars? Dynamics of shared attention on twitter during media events. PLoS ONE9(5), doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0094093.
26.
LiuJHMcCreanorTMcIntoshT, et al. (2005) Introduction: Constructing New Zealand identities. In: LiuJHMcCreanorTMcIntoshT, et al. (eds) New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations. Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University Press, pp. 11–20.
27.
LotzAD (2014) The Television Will Be Revolutionized, 2nd edn.New York: New York University Press.
28.
MaraghRS (2016) ‘Our struggles are unequal’: Black women’s affective labor between television and Twitter. Journal of Communication Inquiry40(4): 351–369, doi: 10.1177/0196859916664082.
29.
MarottaV (2000) The ambivalence of borders: The bicultural and the multicultural. In: DockerJFischerG (eds) Race, Colour and Identity in Australia and New Zealand. Sydney: UNSW Press, pp. 177–189.
30.
MarwickAEboydd (2011) I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society13(1): 114–133, doi: 10.1177/1461444810365313.
31.
McPhersonKHuotariKChengFY-S, et al. (2012) Glitter: A mixed-methods study of Twitter use during glee broadcasts. In: Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work Companion, New York: ACM, pp. 167–170, doi: 10.1145/2141512.2141569.
32.
MikaereA (2004) Are we all New Zealanders now? A Māori response to the Pākehā quest for indigeneity. Bruce Jesson Lecture. Auckland, New Zealand. Available at: http://www.converge.org.nz/pma/iwi-am04.pdf (accessed 31 May 2016).
33.
MitchellT (2010) ‘Kiwi’ music and New Zealand national identity. In: JohnsonHM (ed.) Many Voices: Music and National Identity in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, pp. 20–29.
34.
OwenC (2016) Interview with Cate Owen by author.
35.
PattersonE (2018) Must tweet TV: ABC’s #TGIT and the cultural work of programming social television. Transformative Works and Cultures26, doi: 10.3983/twc.2018.1147.
36.
ScottS (2008) Authorized resistance: Is fan production frakked? In: PotterTMarshallCW (eds) Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica. New York: Continuum, pp. 210–223.
37.
ShoreC (2017) ‘100% pure New Zealand’: National branding and the paradoxes of scale. In: HannerzUGingrichA (eds) Small Countries: Structures and Sensibilities. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press.
38.
SmithJAbelS (2015) Ka Whawhai Tonu Mātou: Indigenous television in Aotearoa/New Zealand. In: PearsonWGKnabeSM (eds) Reverse Shots: Indigenous Film and Media in an International Context. Waterloo, Ont.: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, pp. 175–188.
39.
SpoonleyP (2015) New diversity, old anxieties in New Zealand: The complex identity politics and engagement of a settler society. Ethnic and Racial Studies38(4): 650–661, doi: 10.1080/01419870.2015.980292.
StewartM (2016) The myth of televisual ubiquity. Television & New Media17(8): 691–705, doi: 10.1177/1527476416655384.
43.
TurnerSSturmS (2012) Excellent universities, Here, there and everywhere. Inquire: Journal of Comparative Literature2(2). Available at: http://inquire.streetmag.org/articles/77 (accessed 19 September 2018).
WilliamsR (2003) Television: Technology and Cultural Form. London: Routledge.
46.
WoodMMBaughmanL (2012) Glee fandom and Twitter: Something new, or more of the same old thing?Communication Studies63(3): 328–344, doi: 10.1080/10510974.2012.674618.
X Factor NZ (2015b) We’re back at 7.30pm tonight with more amazing talent and our very first rapper! #XfactorNZ is going 8 Mile! pic.twitter.com/yDJorCElDv. In: @xfactornz. Available at: https://twitter.com/xfactornz/status/567158085546831872 (accessed 7 June 2016).
49.
ZodgekarA (2005) The changing face of New Zealand’s population and national identity. In: LiuJHMcCreanorTMcIntoshT, et al. (eds) New Zealand Identities: Departures and Destinations. Wellington, NZ: Victoria University Press, pp. 140–154.
50.
ZuboffS (2019) The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. London: Profile Books.
