Online audiences and televised political debates : shifting discourses of public engagement

Abstract

Public participation in political broadcasting has offered an important site for
engagement between citizens and their elected representatives in interactions which
take place live, on air, and often in front of a studio audience. As technology has
advanced, producers have taken advantage of the affordances of digital media in
broadcasting political debates, shifting frameworks of participation beyond the
studio and inviting participation across a range of media platforms. Here I examine
the online audience activity, prior to, during and after televised leaders’ debates in
the run up to the UK 2010 general election, focussing on how this audience engages
in various contextually relevant forms of discursive interactivity, oriented towards a
position of spectatorship rather than through engagement with content