Emotions through Audio-Visual Product Consumption: Intensity, Popularity, and Variance

In the history of development cultural consumption technological innovations have been thought of as a key factor in media globalization. New digital technologies have allowed new forms of accessing markets through social media and online broadcasting platforms and have been generated leading to a dematerialization of the media products.

Within the traditional way of promoting cultural productions, promoters have enjoyed a monopolistic power on the market due to the use of traditional media, allowing them to choose the next stars, confounding quality and popularity. While the audiences were left with a passive role, take it or leave it. Consequently, the research also has focused on the consumption of USA production in other countries. However, thanks to social media the cultural production flow has become multidirectional from both Western and Eastern countries. And the role of the audience interacting in social media has changed the mechanism of being popular in the market. It is evident that a new model and thus new research on cross-cultural consumption is needed to understand this new phenomenon.

With this article, we contribute to fill this gap by conducting cross-cultural media consumption from non-US to western countries. We applied a quantitative analysis to qualitative textual data, comments of audience, based on the size of the data in three languages: English, French and Spanish.

In particular, we inspect the emotions expressed by viewers during media consumption in order to suggest the new measurement of popularity in cultural market by relying on several stardom theories. The relation of high popular series with emotion sharing is mediated by an exponential process fueled by the series’ market size, but effect has change with social media.