Live streaming and the perils of proximity

ABSTRACT

This essay aims to disturb the popular (and sometimes critical) claim that the primary utility of live streaming’s particular set of affordances is the collapsing of distance and creation of proximity. While critiquing claims for transparency and immediacy made for various representational and communicative media is a standard, not an innovative, move within media and performance studies, promises of live streaming’s affinity for eliding distance and conjuring proximity seem interestingly resistant to the critical skepticism that often attends claims of immediacy more generally. In foregrounding the tendency to characterize live streaming by relying on iterations of previous claims made for television and participatory social media, I hope to add some urgency to the project of theorizing live streaming according to its own, emerging collection of affordances and practices. Perhaps more importantly, I advocate for critical voices to attend specifically to the ways in which live streaming and live streams necessarily, and potentially usefully, encode distance, difference, and separation.

KEYWORDS:

• Streaming
• live
• immediacy

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Lindsay Brandon Hunter is Assistant Professor of Theatre at the University at Buffalo. Her forthcoming book, Playing Real: Media, Mimesis, and Mischief (Northwestern University Press, 2020) takes on sites as varied as live-broadcast theatre, reality television, and alternate reality gaming to examine how theatricality and mediatization work both to enact and to interrogate notions of authenticity and realness in performance. Her writing appears in Theatre Topics, Theatre Survey, Theatre Journal, Amodern, and Contemporary Theatre Review.

Notes

1 Burroughs notes that not only is streaming data live-arriving, that ‘no audience user streams the same stream twice (to pervert Heraclitus)’, since ‘Every compressed stream is a differentiated viewing experience’. The differentiation Burroughs refers to is produced by codecs which identify and eliminate redundancies in images in order to compress them; predictive algorithms enable codecs to compress, and therefore constitute, moving images on the fly, meaning ‘that every stream someone watches, despite being the same content, is fundamentally different’ (157).

2 Broadcast was certainly disrupted before the advent of streaming. In her aptly named The Television Will Be Revolutionized, Lotz (2014) locates the post-network era of television as emerging prior to the arrival of Neflix, Hulu, and Amazon’s streaming services, pointing to the ascendancy of cable TV as the beginning of the end for an older broadcast model. Still, as the second edition of Lotz’s book makes clear, streaming technologies have accompanied significant change in practices of producing, consuming, and interacting with television.

3 On 15 March 2019, a mass murderer used Facebook Live to stream his assault on a pair of mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. According to Facebook, the content was not reported until twelve minutes after the stream was concluded. Subsequently, the platform’s pointed lack of any effective means to censor or reduce the impact of such streams was hotly debated in public forums; in response, Facebook announced that it would revise its ‘Dangerous Organizations and Individuals’ policy in order to more significantly restrict from Facebook Live ‘anyone who violates our most serious policies’. The company’s announcement, attributed to Vice President for Integrity Guy Rosen (2019), attempted somewhat awkwardly to reconcile Facebook Live’s potential for abuse with the company’s positioning of it a salutary tool for interpersonal connection: ‘We recognize the tension between people who would prefer unfettered access to our services and the restrictions needed to keep people safe on Facebook’, Rosen’s announcement read, locating that tension within the presumed wants and needs of its users rather than inherent within Facebook’s own rhetoric and policies.