ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the communicative patterns that are associated with ambient liveness, in particular, how live-tweeting practices afford the opportunity for forging different attitudinal alignments and forms of 'ambient affiliation'. Social media discourse offers an important resource for audience researchers, seeking to understand new forms of hybrid media use. Linguistic study is required to understand the particular conversation-like practices that characterize live-tweeting via second screens, and the particular communicative functions they enact. The chapter employs corpus-based discourse analysis to explore the communicative practices viewers engage in when live-tweeting a particular program broadcast in Australia, My Kitchen Rules (MKR). The posts in the MKR corpus were scraped from the Twitter Application Programming Interface (API) using the DMI Twitter Capturing and Analysis Toolset (DMI-TCAT). Unsurprisingly, the discourse in the MKR corpus conformed to a more restricted field than the reference corpus.
