Streaming Media

The next speaker in this fascinating AoIR 2023 session is Yvonne Eadon, whose interest is in the subscription-based streaming platform Gaia.com, the self-declared ‘Netflix of consciousness-raising media’. She describes this as a kind of conspirituality capitalism, which is perhaps accidentally encountered by people searching for life advice and spiritual content.

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Kyle Moody, who shifts our focus to branding and consumption markets in cultures; much fandom is tied up with such branding activities. In particular, the focus here is on Twitch, where affective labour and fan work collides with the gig economy of media content creation.

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Fatima Gaw, whose interest is in the political economy of social media manipulation. Thus far we only have a very partial knowledge of this political economy; there is work focussing on bots, trolls, and fake accounts, using big but limited social media data, or occasionally doing ethnographic work. There is also much reliance on secondary sources. Further interdisciplinary methods combining these and other approaches are needed to determine the scope and scale of this political economy.

It’s that time of the year, and I’m in Philadelphia for the 2023 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (continuing my 21-year streak of attending AoIR), which starts in earnest with the keynote by Aymar Jèan ‘AJ’ Escoffery. His focus is on reparative media, and he begins by noting that it feels like our collective harms are intensifying. This is exacerbated to some extent by corporate media, who often distribute the equivalent of fast, globally consumable food rather than slow and locally relevant content. This perpetuates injustices which require a particular approach to repair, including grassroots (re)distribution.

Power in the media and cultural industries is located in their cultural distribution systems (from development through production, distribution, and exhibition, to audiences, and thence repeating the cycle. This is true for all major platforms, including for example Netflix and other streaming services, which are often integrated with the major production studios to create a Hollywood-style streaming studio system (if not yet as well established).

The creators involved in these processes usually have no right of ownership over their creations; this is especially problematic for women and minority groups, and does not tend to produce diverse content. Minorities also remain underrepresented at the executive producer level. This also produces various other harms to them, for instance at personal, physical, and psychological levels; it also results in reductive storytelling that privileges a handful of major and often simplistic narratives.

The second speaker in this Future of Journalism 2023 conference session is Raul Ferrer-Conill; he begins with pointing to the long-standing discussion of whether digital and social media platforms are publishers or merely carriage services – or more recently, perhaps, tech and infrastructure companies. Such infrastructure is centrally important, of course, as the material basis for mediated communication.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2022 is E. Brooke Phipps, whose focus is on how TikTok activists in the US fight conservatism and disinformation. This can be seen as a form of trolling directed at disinformation propagators, and thus turning a prominent practice of the far right against it: tactical trolling has now also emerged as a key form of digital resistance by left-wing activists (also in South Korea). This is also a youth practice: nearly half of all TikTok users are understood to be younger than 30 years.

The final AoIR 2022 session for today starts with Christian Ritter, whose interest is in journalistic newsmaking on YouTube during the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in late 2021. The global nature of YouTube potentially also enables decolonising discourses about climate change.

The final speaker in this AoIR 2019 session is Arnt Maasø, who shifts our attention to the role of metrics in the music business. Datafication has grown in the music industry as well, with a strong turn to metrics in recent years. Where some decades ago the industry was run by self-taught entrepreneurs who were running their businesses predominantly by gut instinct, now music metrics are everywhere and directly influence decision-making.

The final session at IAMCR 2019 for today starts with George Anghelcev, whose focus is on binge-watching. There has been a major shift over the last decade in how audiences view serialised video content, from being constrained to the regular timeslots for TV series to on-demand viewing of multiple episodes in single sittings. Some three quarters of U.S. TV consumers now binge-watch, and the numbers continue to rise – contrary to earlier news coverage, this is not a minority practice.

Up next at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium are Tiziano Bonini and Alessandro Gandini, who are interested in ethnographic research in the age of platforms, even in spite of the black boxing strategies now employed by many platforms to protect themselves from scrutiny.