The new practices and infrastructures of participation: how the popularity of Twitch.tv challenges old and new ideas about television viewing

ABSTRACT

A central theme in media research has been the transition from traditional broadcast media, like television and radio, to social media and streaming services. For both researchers and practitioners in the field, a crucial concern has been how to understand the emerging forms of flexibility and interactivity that characterize the use of new media platforms. This article adds to this work by analyzing new viewing and audience practices of the streaming platform Twitch, addressing how emergent ways of viewing and engaging with broadcasts both challenges and revitalizes established concepts from television audience studies. For some years, researchers and media analytics have been discussing to which extent Netflix, Hulu, YouTube and other on-demand streaming services represents the death of linear-TV [see, e.g., Lotz, A. D. (2014). The television will be revolutionized. New York, NY: New York University Press; Lotz, A. D. (2017). A treatise on internet-distributed television. Michigan, MI: Maize Books; Buonanno, M. (2016). (Not yet) the end of television: Editor’s introduction [Special issue]. Media and Communication, 4(3), 95–98]. Conventional wisdom dictates that only sports and other great events will uphold the flow, linearity and liveness of traditional television. However, our analysis shows how linear-TV is re-emerging in other, novel forms as well. Central to the analysis is the concepts of ‘spatial switching’ and ‘affective switching’, which is used to illuminate the ways in which Twitch practices and infrastructures introduces new dimensions of flexibility, convenience and user-control to flow, liveness and linear-TV.

KEYWORDS:

• Twitch
• live streaming
• streaming
• television studies
• game studies
• audience studies

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Hendrik Storstein Spilker is associate professor in media sociology at the Institute for Sociology and Political Science at Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim. He is the author of books such as Digital music distribution: The sociology of online music and Kommunikasjonssamfunnet (The Communication Society), as well as several articles on digital media and Internet and platform culture and politics. He is currently engaged with the research projects STREAM: Streaming the Culture Industries and DICE: Digital Infrastructures and Citizen Empowerment [email: [email protected]].

Kristine Ask (PhD) is an associate professor of Science and Technology Studies at NTNU. She researches human–technology relationships, with a focus on emergent practices, ways of knowing and processes of inclusion and exclusion in online communities. A particular research interest lies in internet culture dismissed as being too trivial for serious analysis. She is the co-founder of Nordic Journal of Science and Technology Studies, writes for the award winning blog Spillpikene and can be reached at @kristineask [email: [email protected]].

Martin Hansen holds an MA in Media, Communication and Information Technology from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). He wrote his master thesis on user practices on Twitch.tv [email: [email protected]].

ORCID

Hendrik Storstein Spilker http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1792-4464

Notes

1 This is the top-ten list: 1. Google.no; 2. YouTube; 3. Facebook; 4. Google.com; 5. Reddit; 6. Vg.no (Norwegian newspaper); 7. Wikipedia.org; 8. Finn.no (marketplace); 9. Nrk.no (national broadcaster); 10. Twitch (retrieved from https://www.alexa.com/topsites/countries/NO, 15-06-2018).

2 The project has not been submitted to an I.R.B., as Norwegian guidelines (at the time) did not warrant it. The gathering and analysis of data is however done in accordance with conventional ethical guidelines for social science; informed consent, confidentiality and anonymization.