LIVE VIDEO: HOW DOES IT WORK?

“Not Every Part Of Your Life Needs To Be Public”

Live streaming platforms bring events from all around the world to people’s computing devices. While live streams and Snapchat Live Stories offer popular but different experiences for viewing events, together they provide a window into how people use social media to remotely experience events today. Let me give you an example of how some people use live video. A Minnesota woman used Facebook Live to live stream the aftermath of a police officer shooting her boyfriend Philandro Castille. In August, a New Yorker’s Periscope stream of a man climbing Trump Tower using suction cups reached over 225,000 live viewers. These are just a few well-publicized events in 2016 that demonstrated the rise of live streaming as a tool for sharing exciting or contentious events.

 

Both live streams and Snapchat Live Stories are engaging for viewers. However, people desire to view a future event via live streams more than Snapchat Live Stories, largely due to the interaction live streams afford with the streamer and other viewers. Some of these users also take live video to new places, both in terms of topics and ways of using it. But not everyone seems to take this step. It was somewhat to be expected that the use of mobile live video would be remediated in available formats, such as the Vlog. This could be expected with any new medium involving some degree of unfamiliar technology. But it is clear that mobile webcasting has not yet fulfilled its potential, foreseen by researchers, to become the latest in a long line of successful social media, and to support group interaction and empower citizens.

There remains a challenge for the designers of these services to develop the concept in order to support people’s appropriation and thereby democratize a medium which up to now has been entirely in the hands of well-trained professional TV-producers. Just providing a way to stream video from mobile phones does not seem to be enough.

Reference:

Kari Andén-Papadopoulos. 2013. Citizen camerawitnessing: Embodied political dissent in the age of “mediated mass self-communication.” New Media & Society: 1461444813489863.             https://doi.org/10.1177/1461444813489863