Tuesday, November 13, 2018

Social media and the consumption of telenovelas

Last week in class, different groups of students spoke about the consumption of the telenovelas that each of us have been watching throughout the semester. Regardless of the differences in the storylines of each telenovela, there were many similarities in the ways the telenovelas are or were consumed.

Each telenovela has large amounts of views ranging from 900,000 to over 10 million. Outside of each of the telenovelas having millions of viewers per television episode, it was particularly interesting to see the consumption of each telenovela on social media.

Most of the telenovelas presented in class had official pages with large followings ranging from 400,000 to 4,000,000 followers. On social media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram viewers were able to give feedback about story lines, love stories, and other topics presented in each telenovela on the social media platforms. For each episode, there were thousands of loyal fans commenting on their love for the characters, suggestions for who should end up together and more.

One unique aspect of the social media consumption to me was the following of the telenovela’s main characters. Often times, the stars of the show had more followers than the telenovela itself. Most telenovela stars appear in multiple telenovelas and therefore gain many followers, however, the following of the telenovela starts entices many viewers to mix the fantasy of telenovelas into reality. For example, Kate del Castillo has 6.1 million followers while “La Reina Del Sur” only has 106,000. In a post from Kate del Castillo about the return of “La Reina del Sur” for season 2, close to 10,000 fans commented their joy and excitement and even referred to Kate as her character Teresa Mendoza.

After being given insight into the consumption of telenovelas, I am interested in knowing how the consumption, including viewers reactions, has an effect in shaping the ways the writers of telenovelas continue with each storyline. I am excited to see what I will find in my research regarding this topic.

2 comments:

  1. Pensaba la misma sobre la influencia de los actores y sus propias páginas en Instagram o Facebook. Creo que esto es la misma por los EE. UU.. Por Ejemplo, Liam Neeson en la película "Taken", el protagonista es la cara de la película. Cuando pienso sobre esta película, yo pienso sobre él. Yo creo que cuando hay un protagonista que tiene un significa súper importante por todo una programa o película, nosotros poner un significado en la persona más que la programa.

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  2. Seeing how social media contributes to consumption was really cool for me. I find it amazing that in this day and age that we are able to make the direct connection. In many presentations, I thought it was interesting that spanish telenovelas were very popular on platforms like Instagram and Twitter, along with their characters. It showed that the audience really does consume everything surrounding the telenovela. Additionally, I thought it was eye opening to see how different followings were in Turkey. There were still a lot of followers for certain platforms, but definitely not as much engagement. I found myself questioning why this would be? Is it because of the culture? Is it because they feel they have everything they need just by watching? I think this will be interesting to see as social media continues to have an impact on the media production industry.

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