Understanding the value of networked publics in radio. Employing Digital Methods and social network analysis to understand the Twitter publics of two Italian national radio stations

Radio audiences are today a mix of traditional radio broadcasting audiences and networked publics. This not only means that new media is changing the nature of listeners/viewers, transforming them into interactive users, but also that radio publics, once organized into networks, may have different properties, different behaviours and different values. In this paper, we have employed Digital Methods (DM) and social network analysis to understand the Twitter activity and the communicative dynamics of the audiences of two Italian national radio stations: Radio3 Rai (public service station) and Radio Deejay (private commercial station). This work also aims to respond to a question asked by Rogers when defining DM: ‘Could the information contained in profiles on social networking sites provide different insights into the composition and characteristics of publics?’. Based on the results that have emerged from this study, we believe that the answer can be affirmative: the analysis of the social connections and the interaction models of the networked listeners highlights new features of these audiences, and allows us to reevaluate and understand them from new points of view. This work shows that the digital audiences related to the two radio stations clearly distinguish themselves for their distinctive online behaviour and a different display of social networks, cultural capital and affect. We therefore hypothesize the presence of three different types of capital within the two different audiences analysed: social, cultural and affective capital.