Readings:
The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception. Adorno and Horkheimer.
Encoding/Decoding. Stuart Hall.
Culture is Ordinary. Raymond Williams.

Cultural product I paid attention to:
Twitch.tv

Amazon – the most valuable company in the world (currently worth about $790 billion) – paid $970 million in 2014 to acquire the live video streaming site Twitch.tv. Analysts value the whole of the live streaming industry at somewhere between 10 and 30 billion. The point: it’s a massive industry attracting a massive number of eyeballs (Twitch alone has about 15 million viewers a day).

A lot of people want to watch people watching screens.

The primary draw for viewers on Twitch is gaming; specifically, watching others play games. The majority of popular broadcasters on the platform stream out a feed from a webcam fixed on their on their face as they stare, rapt, at an offscreen gaming monitor or television. Most commonly, the activity on that screen will be superimposed behind them with their own live image relegated to the side or corner of the screen.

On visual inspection alone, one could easily mistake somebody watching a Twitch stream for the act of actually playing a game. With a closer look, one could mistake the act as only watching somebody else play a video game, but there’s a lot more happening in such moments. The visual stuff of Twitch is video game feeds and young people mugging for the camera but there is a deep and complicated social exchange happening.

Twitch – and other similar game streaming services – are social platforms. They create an opportunity for people to interact through text, through voice, through sharing memes. They are spaces for communication. They are spaces where people hangout with friends (both the online variety and the IRL variety).

The act of hanging out has always had a performative element as we present ourselves in ways that fit our context or our company. (The sociologist Erving Goffman put forth this concept in his Presentation of Self In Everyday Life, demonstrating a model that would come to be known as the dramaturgical model of social interaction). The performance of social interaction, however, seems quite different when the performance is 1) so overtly stated and unmistakable, and 2) when the performance has a dollar value associated with it. With Twitch, there is an unavoidable market relationship alongside or even forming the social relationships at play.

As Twitch is a corporate product offered for “free,” viewers are exposed to advertisements constantly. They interrupt and surround the video field. Audience members have the option to subscribe to get rid of those ads, essentially paying to convince oneself that a thing is free. Beyond that exchange, viewers also have the option of further subscribing to and tipping the streamers they like the most, paying directly for the performance of hanging out. And then there is the exchange that is always present in the raw material here: the audience is tuning in to watch the display of an interactive, corporate product. They are watching an ad. They watch ads for the opportunity to watch ads. They pay their favourite streamers for the opportunity to watch ads.

Adorno and Horkheimer are greatly concerned about our relationship to leisure time. They note that “the man with leisure has to accept what the culture manufacturers offer him,” and that “amusement under late capitalism is the prolongation of work.” On Twitch, with our eyeballs and our tips and our subscriptions, we continue to work. We produce and offer up our attention, and we give it most directly to the things the “culture manufacturers offer.”

“(Amusement) is sought after as an escape from the mechanised work process, and to recruit strength in order to be able to cope with it again. But at the same time mechanisation has such power over a man’s leisure and happiness, and so profoundly determines the manufacture of amusement goods, that his experiences are inevitably after-images of the work process itself. The ostensible content is merely a faded foreground; what sinks in is the automatic succession of standardised operations. What happens at work, in the factory, or in the office can only be escaped from by approximation to it in one’s leisure time.”