The Tribe Has Tweeted: Survivor Fans' Expectations of Themselves, Their Community, and the Show Itself Öffentlichkeit

Abstract

This study investigates Twitter engagement by fans of the reality television show Survivor to understand audience reception. My qualitative analysis of 393 tweets responding to the 47th season of Survivor demonstrated that the fan community perceives the show and themselves each in four different ways. What was tweeted was determined by on screen events, with some posts dedicated to “wow moments,” of an absurd and unexpected nature, and others to more consistent topics such as players going home, idols/advantages, gender, and appearances. These categories revealed that fans viewed Survivor as a cast of contestant stories to follow and become attached to, a game competition with rules and strategies that are exciting to engage with, a microcosm of society in which real world issues can be discussed, and a part of the reality television genre in which superficial judgements reign. When tweeting, fans frame their posts as self-referential, other fans directed, player directed, and collective community referential. In utilizing these positions, fans demonstrated the various perspectives they had of their own status as fans and the significance of their fan community: to be a fan they had to be emotionally invested in the program and share that on Twitter to project their selfhood; that fan status required interpersonal engagement within the community that could be carried out on Twitter; that being a fan involved acting as an authority figure over players with their forum of influence as Twitter’ or that as a fan they deserved enjoyable television and would use Twitter to articulate that.

Table of Contents

Introduction .................................................................................................................................................................................................. 1

Literature Review ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 6

Audience Reception ........................................................................................................................................................................................ 6

Fandom ......................................................................................................................................................................................................... 14

Social Television ............................................................................................................................................................................................. 17

Methods ........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 23

Findings ........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 27

What Are Fans Tweeting About? ...................................................................................................................................................................... 27

Tweet Triggers ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 27

Player Going Home Tweets .............................................................................................................................................................................. 28

Idol and Advantage Tweets .............................................................................................................................................................................. 33

Gender Tweets ................................................................................................................................................................................................ 37

Appearance Tweets ......................................................................................................................................................................................... 42

How Are Fans Tweeting? .................................................................................................................................................................................. 46

Self-Referential Tweets .................................................................................................................................................................................... 46

Other Fan Directed Tweets ............................................................................................................................................................................... 50

Player Directed Tweets..................................................................................................................................................................................... 57

Collective Community Tweets .......................................................................................................................................................................... 61

Discussion....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 65

Findings Summary ........................................................................................................................................................................................... 65

Community-Building as Resistance to Commodity-Building ................................................................................................................................ 67

When Low-Brow becomes High-Brow................................................................................................................................................................. 68

Protecting and Celebrating Meritocratic Ideals ................................................................................................................................................... 70

Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 72

References ........................................................................................................................................................................................................ 75

Appendices ....................................................................................................................................................................................................... 81

Appendix A: Temporal Bar Charts for Tweet Topics .............................................................................................................................................. 81

Appendix B: Temporal Bar Charts for Tweet Positioning ....................................................................................................................................... 83

Appendix C: Temporal Bar Graphs for Tweet Emotions ......................................................................................................................................... 85

About this Honors Thesis

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School	Emory College
Department	Sociology
Degree	B.A.
Submission	Honors Thesis
Language	English
Research Field	Sociology, General Web Studies
Stichwort	Twitter Fan Status Reality Television Audience Reception Social Television Fandom Fan Community Survivor (Television Show)
Committee Chair / Thesis Advisor	Nalkur, Sonal Gersappa, Emory University
Committee Members	Dowd, Timothy, Emory University Schainker, Ellie, Emory University

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