More than a Hashtag: Producers' and Users' Co-creation of a Loving "we" in a Second Screen TV Sports Production

Abstract

This article presents a case study of a series of Swedish football commentary webcasts where both producers and users engage in communication with each other during the FIFA World Cup in 2014. The main aim is to identify what the participants do to construct sociable bonds with each other using the technological affordances available, specifically those connected to second screens. Second screening is approached as a thoroughly sociable activity rather than a practice you engage in for primarily instrumental reasons like finding facts or statistics. The analysis shows how users and producers adopt strategies of inclusion oriented to creating a joint sense of "being here together" in the community that is formed around the official hashtag expressenvm. The results indicate that second screen setups of this kind have the potential of displacing the big TV screen and its live sports event, at least for a specific user crowd.