From Strategic Retweets to Group Hangs: Writers’ Room Twitter Accounts and the Productive Ecosystem of TV Social Media Fans

Abstract

In the current participatory television environment, social media serves both a social backchannel for interactions between audience members and a direct line of communication between audiences and production. Because audience activity on social media becomes part of the media brand, it is a priority for the industry to achieve some level of control/influence on that activity. In this article, I discuss writers’ room Twitter accounts as a space used to model and reinforce fan behavior that serves industry interests, arguing that these accounts serve industry needs through the behaviors they promote and recognize. Through analysis of three writers’ room Twitter accounts—for Jane the Virgin, Faking It, and Orange Is the New Black—I show how this process works, as well as the ways in which a show’s individual industrial context shapes the type of fan that is hailed.