Watching and Tweeting: Youngsters' Responses to Media Representations of Resistance

Abstract

There has been considerable debate about the potential of social media to promote new democratic practices and active citizenship. However, the participation of young people in social networks seems to go in a more playful than ideological direction. This article discusses youngsters’ activity in Twitter simultaneously with the television viewing of two films: «V for Vendetta» and «The Hunger Games». As both films address social and political issues, we intend to identify whether youngsters referred to ideological issues in tweets generated during their viewing, and whether these tweets lead to joint reflection on the current social situation. 1,400 tweets posted during the broadcasts of the films in Spanish TV in 2014 were collected for this purpose. The encoding of messages is carried out following a «coding and counting» approach, typical of the studies of Computer-mediated communication. Then messages are classified based on their content. The results obtained indicate that messages about the social and political content of the films are almost non-existent, since young people prefer to comment on other aspects of the films or their lives. The conclusions have a bearing on the importance of considering popular culture, for its social and political implications, as a motive for reflection, and the importance of boosting a critical media education..