The Facebook Watch Phenomenon in Italy: An Explorative Analysis

If, according to Eco, there are two phases of TV since the creation of the media, nowadays it‘s necessary to define the characteristics of a television that now converges with the Internet. Carlos Scolari calls it hypertelevision and frames it in a system of hypermediations and media convergence. But a television that depends on the Internet has been reality for some time and is almost normalized, also it pushes toward innovations in which the TV as a medium disappears and its formats become produced and distributed by the big online forces, which are not created specifically for it. If Twitter, fusing with Periscope, started to cast sport events in live streaming, Facebook is trying to stay a step ahead by producing original contents. The area of the platform dedicated to videos is called Facebook Watch and went live already a year ago in the USA. Facebook branded serial products are already numerous, but they‘re available in Italy just recently. Because of this, it‘s appropriate to observe this new mash-up between social media and television. In a hyperintegrated, interdisciplinary world, made by connections between knowledge and disciplines, there‘s the need to study different sides of the same phenomenon. The focus will be partly on analysing how the Watch section works, which are the original contents produced by Facebook, what are those available in Italy and will be studied the case of Sorry for your loss, the biggest Facebook production until now, with Elizabeth Olsen. From a sociological point of view, will be studied the relevance of the phenomenon, how the section is currently used, and mostly its social implications. The study is then also based on the reaction of Italian users and consumers through different research strategies. Methodologically, and referring to social media, is impossible not to speak about Big Data and they need a mixed method research strategy. Using quantitative techniques like Web Scraping, will be extracted contents about the phenomenon from the same Facebook platform, to analyse the relevance; consequently, via qualitative strategies, will be studied the social implications and users/consumers reactions. In detail, the research design can be defined as integrated, and it also refers to the Grounded Theory model (Charmaz, 2014) for the theorical construction. The integration of Big Data depends of a necessary sequentiality, so they are used as indicators in the analysis prosecution.