Can’t wait to feel better: Facebook Live and the recalibration of downtime in tending to the body

Introduction

‘What will we wait for when we no longer need to wait to arrive? To this question we can now respond: we wait for the coming of what abides. . .’ (Virilio, 2008: 120).

What kind of time do we experience when we wait? When we wait for someone to turn up to a video call, time feels like an interlude; when we wait for our Facebook News Feed to load, time feels like a clot in our throat as the buffering icon keeps on spinning. In waiting, we realize that there is a multitude to temporalities: time can be standardized so people can be in the same place at the same time, but time also dwells inside each of us – in the consciousness of our finite lifetime and in the rhythms of our body. Technology has been said to accelerate time and contract duration (Hassan, 2011, Wajcman, 2014); what, then, of waiting with technology? Technology has not made waiting redundant, but it seems to have transformed waiting substantially. When we reach for our phone as we wait, with or without a direction, waiting is given shape outside of our own body. When we wait on or with our phone, however, waiting re-emerges as viscerally within.

Liveness captures some of these entangled dynamics of waiting in the presence of technology. Certain temporal arrangements are to be made for liveness to be enacted: someone to “go live,” someone to “watch live,” something to be happening “live,” some technologies to faithfully carry out “the live.” Radio is thought of as a live medium (Vianello, 1985), broadcast television is live insofar as it competes with the new viewing platforms and business models such as Netflix and Hulu (van Es, 2017), “digital liveness” has been understood as “our conscious act of grasping virtual entities as live in response to the claims they make on us” (Auslander, 2012: 10). Liveness temporality is multiple and contingent on its medium; the “paradox of liveness” lies in its apparent constructedness and its seeming claim to provide direct access to the event relayed (van Es, 2017). There is a similar paradox to the temporality of waiting: waiting is an enactment of particular bodily and extra-bodily temporalities, but waiting is also time temporalizing through the body.

In the sections that follow, I explore what it means when people engage in liveness as a way to overcome waiting – to recalibrate downtime. I begin by outlining the paradox of liveness as algorithmic and liveness as lived by reviewing current disparate literatures. I proceed by establishing the relationship between liveness and time in the presence of technology through a discussion of “medial eigenzeit.” I have chosen the mediatized practice of diện chẩn – a Vietnamese unregulated therapeutic method – on Facebook Live as the case study. In my discussion of this case, I reflect on my fieldwork in the US and Vietnam where I interviewed and observed the practices of diện chẩn livestreamers and audiences over a period of 2 years. While the case examined here is local and particular, I hope to show that the reverberation of downtime and liveness temporalities has created an alternative temporal space for practices whose temporality is at odds with the temporal structure of institutions and society. Furthermore, it is through my discussion of the case that I develop my conceptualization of downtime as multiscale: downtime exists in between the micro action and inaction of everyday life, but also in larger episodes of personal and health crises that reorient the body toward technologies for instantaneous replenishment of meaning and activity. Viewing liveness through the analytical lens of downtime allows us to trace the mechanisms with which liveness is variously enacted as a particular interaction between institutions, technologies, and people. It also allows us to trace the emergence of tactical digital temporal spaces that thrive at the margin of more enduring institutional temporal structures.

The apparent paradox of Facebook Live

Since Facebook publicly launched its social livestreaming service Facebook Live in 2016, the platform has vigorously pushed the service through its technical and commercial infrastructure, going as far as tweaking its algorithm to favor live videos (Rein and Venturini, 2018). In a post that commemorates the launch of this service on 6 April 2016, Mark Zuckerberg said:

Live is like having a TV camera in your pocket. Anyone with a phone now has the power to broadcast to anyone in the world. When you interact live, you feel connected in a more personal way. This is a big shift in how we communicate, and it’s going to create new opportunities for people to come together. (Zuckerberg, 2016)

Facebook Live was developed with an amalgamation of the “media logic” that permeates the imagination of Silicon Valley: individual communication power, 24/7 content broadcast, user interactivity, and unsubstantiated connectedness. While applications for real-time video transmission over the Internet are not new, live video as a social medium is a more recent phenomenon, with earliest social live-streaming platforms such as ComVu PocketCaster launched in 2005, followed by Bambuser and Ustream (Juhlin et al., 2010). Facebook Live as one of the latest additions to the Facebook ecosystem not only inherits and innovates against the technologies that came before, but also actively shapes the evolution of video livestreaming as a major influence. Rein and Venturini (2018) showed how, through strategic partnership and technological infrastructural tweaks, Facebook Live is far from a case of “spontaneous innovation.” Instead, Facebook Live influences both the editorial organization as well as the storytelling of live video streaming, co-producing rather than simply facilitating livestreaming content. This coproduction ushers in temporalities specific to the artificial figuration of Facebook Live as an assemblage – the evolving arrangement of which co-emerges with specific user subjectivities that would then feed-back into this arrangement. In 2017, one out of five videos on Facebook was a live broadcast; Facebook Live videos produce six times as many interactions as traditional videos, 165% more comments than on-demand videos, and retain the attention of users three times as long (99firms, 2020).

In a computationally extensive study, Raman et al. (2018) analyzed 3TB of Facebook Live data for patterns of global activity only to question whether the platform is “truly” live, or indeed can even be considered a “broadcast” service at all. This conclusion is drawn from the findings that, despite gathering much more engagement compared to traditional non-live videos, most of the engagement with Facebook Live videos comes after the live broadcast. Specifically, on average during the live broadcast, videos in their dataset receive 6.7 likes, 8.4 comments, and 0.54 shares; 1 day after broadcast, the engagement counts jump to 29.84 likes, 16.33 comments, and 1.33 shares (Raman et al., 2018). Lamenting that because as much as 41.5% of all Facebook Live videos were never watched, the researchers suggest locally storing the video content on the broadcasters’ mobile devices until viewers arrive to save network bandwidth and battery consumption. This recommendation, if taken up by Facebook Live, triggers a fundamentally different model of content circulation on the platform: one that resembles an on-demand service, where livestreaming videos without an audience are set free from the mobile devices that house them only if these livestreams fail to satisfy the conditions that make them “live” in the first place. In other words, broadcasts are not broadcasts if they fail to cast upon a broad audience, and live videos are not live if their audience comes with a delay.

What is missing here? From a technical point of view, liveness seems to be synonymous with simultaneity: are there people watching at the other end, as the video is being recorded? Yet for liveness to come about, instantaneity also needs to be at play: a video trapped inside a mobile device simply cannot “go live.” At the heart of what motivates the researchers of this study lies the unexamined intimate relationship between “realtime” and sociality – be it to the event/performance, or to people – that colors the experience of liveness. The meaning of “live” is always contrasted to and informed by the “non-live”; it is because of this that the conditions under which liveness comes into being deserves disentangling. Probing into the apparent paradox of liveness on Facebook Live could tell us something important about our relationship with time and the technology that mediatizes that relationship. As we will see in the section that follows, liveness oscillates between instantaneity and simultaneity as it takes on multiple iterations contingent on platform affordances. Liveness as instantaneity transforms downtime as moments of disjuncture, and as simultaneity provides temporal structure for the tactical persistence of practices that are out of sync with the rhythms of institution and society.

Liveness and time: a tale of co-dependency

Liveness is a central category in media studies’ concern with the question of time and media (Auslander et al., 2019). Early works on liveness in relation to performances and mediatization has recognized the liveness category as historically contingent: what is experienced or counts as “live” on one medium at one point in time does not necessarily remain stable over time and across media (Auslander, 1999, 2008). The continued relevance of liveness as a technological feature (ontology), an experience (phenomenology), and a normative value (rhetoric) has prompted van Es (2017) to develop a method she termed “constellation of liveness” – where liveness is conceptualized as a socio-technical construction whose multiple forms populate the changing media landscape as they become bound by the roles they fulfill in society. Following this approach, van Es (2017) suggests understanding liveness as oriented around newness: that liveness is indebted to the particular ways in which media are increasingly structured to demand attention from people now, rather than later. It is through the mechanism of liveness that media platforms proliferate in abundance: in an overcrowded media landscape, each medium is asserting its significance through an appeal to the live (Auslander et al., 2019).

But when and how is liveness demarked from the non-live? van Es (2017) suggests that the domain of liveness is constitutive of metatext, space of participation, and user responses. Metatext refers to a collection of information about the platform itself as discursive sites, which could include platform features, promotional materials, or interviews with platform representatives. Space of participation is shaped by techno-cultural, economic, and legal forces. User responses, which comprise instances of reflection and commentary on the platform by users themselves, contribute to the meaning of liveness through the agency of users interpreting the liveness proposed by metatext. There is a multiplicity to liveness; it neither exists in a pure form nor comes in a range of degrees – liveness is contingent on a situational context as well as knowledge of what it is that is being made “live.”

If liveness is multiple, so is time. Time with a capital T – clock-time, or universal time – is standardized in replicable units to provide a temporal structure to everyday life, but it is not the only way time is experienced. Nowotny (1989, 2019) describes eigenzeit – self-time – to capture qualitative changes in individual perception of time and the corresponding experience to the structuration society imposes on time. These changes are a result of acceleration – a phenomenon she conceptualizes as not only owing itself to science and technology, but also as contingent upon the cultural and social interconnections that are enabled, boosted, and expanded by technology. This acceleration also results in a more profound change: that in the relationship between lifetime and eigenzeit. Time seems to be out of joint for most of us: a “deep-seated sense of unease and massive stress” is caused by the speed with which the world is hurtling forth – a speed that outstrips our biological, cognitive, neural, and mental capacities (Nowotny, 2019: 70).

But technology also giveth what it taketh away. In revisiting eigenzeit almost 30 years after it was first conceptualized, Nowotny (2019) describes what she calls “medial eigenzeit” as a technology-based set of options to satisfy the longing for the moment. Medial eigenzeit is accessible from everywhere with a mobile device – it is at once standardized and personalized, individually available and yet socially connective. As she puts it:

Immersing oneself in medial eigenzeit grants time to indulge in exchange with others. Rather than the conscious void that is being sought in the practice of mindfulness, time is full of information—about the world, about friends, even if these are ‘friends’ only in the social media sense; information about oneself and those parts of it that we want to share with others. It gives us a sense that we are incessantly engaged in communication with the entire world. (Nowotny, 2019: 77).

In living with medial eigenzeit, downtime is in constant rehabilitation. Here, downtime as temporal voids is augmented with a constant anticipation for what comes next. The body engages with technology in ways that add layers to its inner temporality and modulate its experience of time. We actively work through boredom with our hands: scrolling through our Facebook feed, thumbing our frustrations on Twitter, double-tapping the images we like on Instagram, sliding our fingers across the screen to skip to the part of a video we want to watch, extending our index finger and thumb to zoom in, narrowing them to zoom out. Each of these haptic motion commands a different body temporality; they have been designed to compensate for the lack of tactile feedback inherent to flat-screen devices so that they can facilitate effective human-machine interface. Our tactual exploration of the external world relies primarily on the hand: the hand is voluntarily moved across a surface or manipulates an object so that it could obtain specific spatial and temporal information. Viewing these tactual explorations with technology in the context of downtime allows us to examine how embedded technological uses are in time: how time motivates these uses as it lends itself to transformation by these very socio-technical enactments.

Through these exploratory procedures, our haptic sense serves as an intermediary for our vision and audition (Jones, 2018). Haptic sensing is unique compared to other human senses in that it is bidirectional: as we reach out to discover the properties of the world, we perceive as much as we also act directly upon it. On occasion, we also reflexively act upon our own body. As I will discuss in the section that follows, the case of diện chẩn livestreaming practice entails both the hand actively working through boredom by engaging with technology (in the case of livestreaming audience) and the hand demonstrating its capacity to recuperate not only down time, but also its own material body (in the case of both audience and livestreamers). I will focus on the “constellation of liveness” in Facebook Live to demonstrate how, through the temporality of downtime, liveness is able to oscillate between simultaneity and instantaneity. The result of this oscillation is a reverberation of multiple enactments of liveness that are more than one, but not fragmented into many: even when simultaneity and instantaneity do not coincide, they echo in each other’s aura in the facilitation of liveness. I will also, through my description of the case, unpack downtime both as an empirical phenomenon and as an analytical category to explicate the relationship between downtime and eigenzeit more broadly.

The case of diện chẩn: downtime, liveness, and the body

Diện chẩn is an emergent non-biomedical therapeutic practice. Non-biomedical practices, defined as therapeutic modalities that exist in separation but not isolation from biomedicine, remain widely popular throughout the world (Nguyen, 2019). Variably referenced in disparate literatures as “traditional medicine,” “alternative medicine,” “complementary medicine,” “unorthodox medicine” (see Nguyen, 2019 for a more extensive list), these therapeutic practices continue to exist, expand, and evolve at the margin of scientific biomedicine. This marginal existence, however, is only partial; in practice, non-biomedical modalities actively adapt and incorporate scientific methods and sensibilities into their repertoire.

Non-biomedical modalities are not monolithic. There exist complex nested hierarchies of authority within these therapeutic practices. In Vietnam, Northern medicine (thuốc Bắc) is considered a more learned and philosophical tradition compared to Southern medicine (thuốc Nam), due to its indebtedness to Chinese medicine, Vietnam’s neighboring tradition to the North (Monnais et al., 2011). There is also thuốc gia truyền (most literally “family transmission medicine”), which comprises a largely fragmented body of family recipes that are passed down from generation to generation within medical families (Thompson, 2017). Non-biomedical modalities proliferate with a different temporality compared to scientific biomedicine; they ebb and flow through the totality of the highly structured, albeit pluralistic scientific enterprise. They rarely directly confront or challenge the logic of scientific knowledge; it is not in the interest of their survival to do so. As such, their temporality is also different from that of inaccurate understandings of scientific knowledge – the kind that would fuel conspiracy theories and eruptive events such as anti-vaccination movements. Inaccurate understandings of scientific knowledge and conspiracy theories are quick, short, reactive, and cyclical. The temporal currents of non-biomedical practices form new arms and channels as they branch out from the mainstream; new therapies and new interpretations of traditional texts are in constant negotiation with regulatory regimes, the traditions they build upon and veer off, and science with a capital S. What these new arms and channels lack in the authority that comes with established traditions, they make up for in their flexibility to adapt, hybridize, and reinvent themselves.

Diện chẩn (DC) is such an example. Behind this emergent Vietnamese non-biomedical practice, which has attracted an international following via the internet, is an obscure man named Bùi Quốc Châu (BQC), who claims to have single-handedly invented a new way to diagnose and treat most diseases through particular ways to massage the face. Particularly, different constellations of points on a human face, according to DC, are said to correspond to different organs in the human body. If these points are massaged correctly, the claim is that any and all diseases within the corresponding organs can be cured. For example, intense and frequent massaging of the mentolabial sulcus (area between the lower lip and the chin) using a DC tool is claimed to cure uterine fibroids, as the area is believed to correspond to the uterus in the female body. DC claims to have gathered millions of followers in 35 different countries (Vu, 2020). While it is difficult to ascertain the veracity of this claim, my own documentation of this method shows that DC materials are available online in at least nine different languages (Vietnamese, Spanish, Polish, English, Italian, French, Portugese, German, Russian). BQC’s claim of originality and efficacy was once taken seriously by important politicians in the politburo in the 1980s. In 1988, BQC was sent to Havana, Cuba on a mission to both help promote “Vietnamese medicine” to Vietnam’s Communist ally in the Caribbean and to help him hone his craft through “scientiation” (Vietnam National Archive, 2020). The mission was not successful, however, and with the political turbulence within the politburo also came the downfall of DC: BQC’s DC research center in Ho Chi Minh city was later seized by the government, and BQC’s subsequent attempts to gain regulatory recognition by the Vietnamese government proved futile. In 2003, Lao Động newspaper published an article alerting readers to the lack of scientific basis in DC as a method (VNExpress Online, 2003). In 2012, Sài Gòn Giải Phóng newspaper published a three-part investigation into DC and concluded that DC practice not only lacks scientific foundations, it could also be illegal (Sai Gon Giai Phong, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c).

In the sections that follow, I report on the results of my fieldwork in 2019 on DC practice in Vietnam and the US, where I observed and interviewed followers and practitioners of the method at their clinics, their homes, and over videotelephone applications. I also interviewed BQC himself, although his interview is not reported here. In so doing, I explore how downtime is drawn upon by interviewees to explain their engagement with the method as well as the technologies that make the method readily and instantly accessible to them. I have given my interviewees pseudonyms to protect their identities. This study was reviewed and approved by the Human Ethics Committee at The University of Melbourne. As DC moved away from the legal and scientific battles for recognition, it increasingly moves toward the internet, where its tactile propositions find resonance with the temporality of the mobile technologies on which it travels, as it intervenes the self-maintenance of the body and interrupts the temporalities of everyday life.

The main vignettes from my fieldwork are Thu, Lam, and Quang. Each of these vignettes illustrates distinct experiences of multiple liveness, medial self-time, and technology. Thu commits to a career in livestreaming DC therapy tutorials to transform downtime as a larger episode of personal crisis; yet the increasing intensity and scope of what she understands as appropriate for livestreaming is a transformation of downtime as disjuncture of the moment. Lam consumes these therapy livestreams to transform the downtime that comes with experiencing illness; his subsequent decision to pursue livestreaming as a producer both resolves the need to overcome downtime as residing between the action and inaction of everyday life and as opportunity to translate a digital practice into urban mobility. Quang’s experience with consuming therapy livestreams is similar to Lam’s, yet his transnational mobility is tied to his need to recuperate time for a sick body that has been made to wait, away from home.

The durée of downtime

Thu is in her early 40s; when I met Thu at her apartment-cum-clinic in a brand-new apartment complex inside one of Ho Chi Minh City’s latest urban development zones, the door was kept open. As I entered and introduced myself, Thu casually nodded her head to acknowledge my presence and asked me to wait in the clinic room. In the middle of the clinic was a long wooden table, surrounded by plastic chairs on all four sides. There was also a lone hospital bed pushed against the top right corner of the room, under a large window with a view facing the Sai Gon River. As I sat down at the table on which dozens of tripods and smartphones were placed, I noticed that the clinic walls are filled to the brim with DC point chart posters that resemble acupuncture maps of pressure points on the body. I didn’t mind the wait as there was a lot to take in; where point chart posters didn’t fit, portraits of BQC and photos of him and his followers would enter to fill up what could otherwise have been some white space on these walls.

When Thu finally came in to begin our interview, I noticed that she had changed into her uniform – a light purple mandarin collared shirt with toggle buttons, which resembles traditional medicine doctor attire, and a large DC logo on her left chest. Two of her assistants quickly picked up the phones and tripods on the table to install a three-camera setup. I explained to her that it was her right as a participant to enjoy anonymity and to withdraw from the study at any point. “It’s OK, I don’t want to be anonymous. I live stream everything I do here at this clinic every day. Someone will watch it, that’s how I stay connected with my clients,” said Thu.

And so our conversation began. Every time I came back to visit the clinic and talk to Thu’s students and patients, our conversation would be livestreamed on Facebook. I later learned that this almost obsessive documentation and broadcasting of everyday events has become a ritual of sorts for all members of her “crew.” Everyday events are livestreamed on Facebook precisely because they could be; the possibility of an audience is enough to justify the broadcast of an event, regardless of its perceived quality or intended purpose. And because Facebook automatically archives livestream recordings after the livestream has ended, Thu and her crew also see “going live” as an important record-making activity. Thu has a university degree that allowed her to work for a few international companies for almost a decade, during which time she had the opportunity to practice her English and be exposed to foreign cultures, she assured me. Her radical turn to DC, a “100% Vietnamese therapeutic method,” coincided with major disruptions in her life: disillusionment with a 9 to 5 job that did not pay well, marital problems, the birth of her son, and a sudden but deeply felt need to reconnect with Vietnamese culture. She quit her job, moved back in with her parents, and waited for her life to turn around. As would be the case, Thu’s mother happens to be one of BQC’s original followers since the 1980s. Her mother, Ms. Tuyet, would frequently travel South, leaving her and her father behind in Northern Vietnam during the 1980s and 1990s, to accompany BQC on various DC-related trips overseas.

‘It was fate,’ she said, ‘when I felt the most stuck, unseen, and unfulfilled, my mother said maybe it was time I turned to DC. Not only can I take care of myself with this craft, I can even take care of thousands of other people all around the world. They watch me demonstrate, then they practice this [method] on themselves. They watch me practice it on other people, then they do the same on their families and friends. If it works, their families and friends would then practice it on themselves, then on their friends. . . it’s an ever-expanding circle of care.’

Thu’s practice of DC has filled her downtime with activity on two different levels. During a significant episode of personal crisis – this is downtime on a lifetime scale – Thu turned to DC to pulsate the flatlining temporal rhythm in which she found herself.

‘This is a very dignified craft,’ Thu said, ‘before I became involved in DC, I would never dream of commanding a police officer or telling him to follow my instructions. A police officer! Can you believe it? One of my patients is a policeman. I told him to lie down on this bed and take off his shirt so I could perform DC on him to help with his cervical vertebrae. I livestreamed it on Facebook of course, you can always check it. People like him would never have given me the time of day in my previous life as a nobody. DC has completely changed my life for the better.’

Thu needed a sense of purpose; a purpose that can be achieved by doing something instantly, so as not to feel left behind. There is a certain indignity to being someone who waits in a culture of the instant. To sit around waiting is to be out of sync with modernity, with the habit of velocity that dictates how one should live their life; it is to be out of sync with time itself.

Downtime also comes with the experience of illness. Lam, who joined Thu’s group from his hometown less than 200km South of Ho Chi Minh City, was 19 years old when I met him. I sat down with him at a coffee shop near the clinic to talk about his introduction to DC on a separate occasion. As soon as the conversation began, Lam was comfortable enough to share that in his final year of high school, he discovered DC because he had hemorrhoids at the time and “Western medicine” was of no help to him. Out of frustration, he looked up hemorrhoids cures on the internet and followed a few DC tutorials on Youtube, which according to him was able to help him manage the condition. He later discovered the growing number of DC communities on Facebook, Thu’s included, and found out that he could take a DC class directly with BQC if he would make the trip to Ho Chi Minh City and pay the VND5 million (roughly USD220) tuition fee. When he finished high school, his score was not good enough for him to get into university; he figured that pursuing DC professionally – something he seemed to have a particular talent for – would set him apart from his high school friends, who were too busy “chasing grades and studying what they hated.” With his parents’ blessing, he moved to Ho Chi Minh City to embark on his journey as a DC professional.

‘My main job in Ms. Thu’s group is packing and sending DC tools to customers, as well as designing visual materials for social media,’ said Lam, ‘I won’t lie, I was disappointed at first. I expected to be practicing DC on patients right away, curing and helping people. After all, I took my classes with master BQC himself. But now I know that working these tasks gives me more confidence, more experience in communicating with people. Ms. Thu pays me well for someone with no diplomas to speak of. The people we help, especially people we met in a pagoda in Bình Định province on our DC mission trip, appreciate and respect us. I could not ask for a better job right out of high school.’

If downtime for Lam is tied to both the experience of an illness that damaged his self-confidence and the anxieties of getting out of school without a clear direction, downtime for Quang, a Vietnamese-American in his mid-60s who had been living in California since 1973, is a matter of mortality. Having served in the South Vietnam army before Communist North Vietnam won the war in 1975, Quang had vouched to never return to Vietnam on ideological grounds. I met Quang and his family of four, together with two of his best friends in the US, at Thu’s clinic on one hot December afternoon in 2019. He had decided to spend his winter break in Ho Chi Minh City studying DC with BQC and frequenting Thu’s clinic to both “hang out” and get Thu to help with his wife’s chronic fatigue. Quang had been diagnosed with prostate cancer 4 months before this trip; a family relative in the US recommended that he looked up DC on Facebook and follow the livestreaming tutorials on there to help with his illness. “These people are legit, you know,” Quang told me firmly, “I’m not one to be fooled. I know all this seems a little unconventional, but DC really works. I don’t just uproot my family on a whim. My wife and I own a phở shop in Garden Grove, Orange County; it’s not easy for us to leave the shop to our staff and come here for my treatment.”

Quang and I had a long conversation, which was of course livestreamed on Facebook, as we watched Thu perform various DC massage procedures on his wife, Xuan, who is in her early 50s. In another room, An, one of Thu’s assistants, was performing other procedures on Quang’s friends, Toan and Lan, who are in their 70s and 40s respectively. “I had my doubts initially, as you can imagine. I live in the US, this kind of stuff is usually seen as quackery over there. I took the time to google ‘dien chan’ and ‘scam’ together. There was no result! But there were a lot of results for ‘dien chan’, in all kinds of languages, even Russian. All of these results sing praises about master BQC and Thu’s group. That’s how you know they are the real deal.” It was not my place to point out the flaws in his information appraisal strategy. Quang quickly became preoccupied with DC, practicing it every day and closely following Thu’s livestreaming videos on Facebook.

‘The greatest thing about this method is that it allows you to be in charge of your own body, your own health,’ Quang explains, ‘Western medicine takes away all that power from you. You go to the hospital and they let you die there. No dignity whatsoever. Obama made us pay premium prices for nothing. Trump is no better. Here you can practice on yourself, on your family, on your friends. Wherever it hurts, you control it with your own hands. There is true power in that ability.’

The body cannot wait: the oscillation between instantaneity and simultaneity in liveness

If there is indignity in waiting around, there is enchantment in waiting for an object of desire: on the other side of waiting stands the promise of meaningful connections and the abolition of boredom. If waiting around is eigenzeit being out of sync with the times of others, waiting as enchantment ensures that recalibration is always an option. Liveness as simultaneity is the promise of this enchantment; as instantaneity, the promise of dignity: after all, to show respect is to not keep someone waiting. This double recalibration of liveness could act as an efficient time transformer as it enables social arrangements to veer toward the integration and assimilation of different temporal horizons and speeds. Making a sick body wait can be a painful and humiliating ordeal. A body recuperating itself from waiting by extending its primary tactual exploration part – the haptic hands – to touch, scroll, pinch, slide, press, massage, wave, gesticulate, is a body quite literally taking matters into its own hands. We cannot help sensing tactual sensibilities through our skin any more than we can help the passing of time; or as Bergson (2002: 216) would put it, “It is we who are passing when we say time passes.”

‘Thu is livestreaming all the time, so it’s rare that I would run out of materials to learn. If not a tutorial then she’ll be streaming her performance on someone, or introducing new tools that I can buy, or talking about DC in general. There is a significant time difference between Sai Gon and California, so sometimes I watch her livestreams after the fact. Doesn’t matter to me. She’s very charming, Ms. Thu. She has what it takes for this craft. She knows how to speak to people. Sometimes I watch the same video again and again; I would learn something new every time’ said Quang.

Xuan smiled at me as she sat up straight on the designated treatment bed so An could perform a range of massage techniques that were supposed to help Xuan with her chronic fatigue. She was never as involved as her husband Quang in the practice of DC, but remained supportive. “Quang is the kind of man who becomes obsessed really quickly. Whatever he chooses to pursue, he invests all his time and attention.” “Was that how he pursued you?” – giggled Thu, as she asked Xuan to move a little to the left.

‘Sure he did. But seriously, he is engrossed in this thing. Always on his phone watching videos, at the phở shop, at home, picking up the kids, before going to bed. . . One time I even asked if he’s forgotten that he had a wife! He apologized by giving me these DC massages to help me with my back problem. It really did help. When he decided that we would come back to Vietnam so he could learn more about this method, I gave him my full support. We’re all here, aren’t we?’

As downtime becomes recalibrated, it expands and transforms the structure of the everyday. Technology as an option with which to live through downtime has the capacity to weave downtime into the very fabric of time itself. As far as Thu and Lam are concerned, downtime has been permanently recalibrated; as long as they can livestream their works instantly, every day, they are producing digital materials that reiterate their newfound social prestige and rescue them from a previous kind of downtime: downtime as dwelling endlessly in a material world that turns against them, so that their bodies are not so much material facts, but manifestations of duration. “It is we who are passing when we say time passes” (Bergson 2002: 216). Recalibrated downtime is a kind of medial eigenzeit that relieves the body from feeling its own weight. Without the technologies that transform, repurpose, and objectifies time, we become time’s vessel: the sick body feels this most emphatically. For Quang, every moment he otherwise would have spent worrying and feeling helpless is now an opportunity to engage both in a bodied practice that is already instantly available, and in a transnational community built on the mobilization of downtime. Quang’s recalibrated downtime is living through medial eigenzeit that yearns for reconnection with the body in the moment, and on its own terms. Quang told me when Thu and An were out of the room:

Look, I’m not delusional. I know there is no absolute cure to my cancer. But if there is something out there that helps, even just a little, of course I’d try. And so far, these exercises have really worked. I feel much better, bit by bit, every day. You know, me in front of my phone, in my palm, like this. She [Thu] presses (acupressure) point number 12 three times – I press point number 12 three times. . . It’s like I’m practicing it with her. There is a kind of genius in that simplicity.

Liveness is not reducible to instantaneity, however. A recording of a live event is different from a non-live video recording, not only because it is experienced as such, but also because it requires specific temporal coordination from the live-streamer and the audience, as well as particular technological affordances to facilitate that liveness. Thu explained that as her audience base of Việt Kiều – a colloquial term referring to overseas Vietnamese – expands, she becomes more strategic about what kind of content to stream at which point of the day.

Most of these Việt Kiều live in California. That means our afternoon is their morning. I’ve realized that most of them are up and online at around 4pm our time. I try to schedule as many appointments with my clients in the afternoon around that time as possible, so they can wake up and see me in action. If that’s not possible, I always prepare to give a live tutorial around their common problems, like back pain, migraine, heart diseases. Sexual problems are also common. Or problems with fertility. I listen to their problems and I show them a way to solve these problems. Their feedback is key to this process.

This feedback loop not only informs what should go live, it also informs the temporality of liveness. Encountering live videos is increasingly becoming a dominant feature in the Facebook experience: in 2017, one out of five videos on Facebook are live videos (99firms, 2020). The liveness of Facebook Live videos owes itself in large part to its platform logic: even though Facebook itself is not seen as a “live” platform, its News Feed is commonly associated with liveness, both in popular discourse and by the platform itself (van Es, 2017). A Facebook Live video appearing on a user’s News Feed therefore enjoys this double sense of liveness; the instantaneity of the event is relative to when the event becomes visible to the user. This crucial timing depends not on universal time, but on Facebook’s News Feed algorithm – a techno-social artefact built on implicit and concealed implementations of network temporality. Facebook algorithms are proprietary and “black-boxed”; while it is common knowledge that these algorithms are continually tweaked, a complete dissection of these algorithms is neither available nor possible. Some metatext about Facebook algorithms is available, however. van Es (2017) reviewed the principles of temporal organizing of content on Facebook through two main algorithms, EdgeRank (for page post and status update personalization) and GraphRank (for application recommendation personalization, less relevant to our discussion). EdgeRank calculates an affinity score between Facebook users based on the number of interactions between the user initiating the connection (edge) and the viewing user, the weight of each edge type, and time decay – a measure that takes into consideration how long ago an edge was created. The newer the edge, the more relevant it is to the users involved: the higher the likelihood of the associated content to appear on News Feed. This elaboration of network sociality has an implicit built-in temporality, one that favors both instantaneity and simultaneity, although perhaps not of equal measures – there is no transparent way to tell. Given the dynamic nature of Facebook networks, due both to the constant modifications made to platform algorithms and to the trajectories of human relationships, organization of Facebook content is likely to oscillate between these two temporal qualities. The reverberation of simultaneity and instantaneity on all levels of this constellation of liveness – from platform temporalities to the multiscale downtime that carves out a space of participation where techno-cultural, economic, and extra-legal forces converge, and the everyday reflections and tactics of uses from users (or user responses) – circumscribe the domain of liveness on Facebook.

Downtime, recalibrated: enactments of liveness and their effects

Previous sections have shown that liveness is variously enacted rather than existing in a pure form that can readily be contrasted against the “non-live.” These enactments oscillate between simultaneity and instantaneity: the decision to “go live” on Facebook is made because it can be done instantly, just as the decision to watch a live recording is made because it is instantly available. Thu would livestream any and all activities happening in her clinic because her phones and tripods are at hand; Quang would watch all live recordings multiple times because they are made available to him instantly through his phone. Simultaneity becomes a character of second-order importance because it is thought to have been built into the platform affordances of Facebook Live. When there is a conscious attempt to coordinate simultaneity in Facebook livestreaming, the live event is demarked not from non-live events, but from other live events of a different temporality: it is an occasion in which simultaneity becomes of first-order importance. Thu’s conscious shift in livestreaming strategy in response to her audience in California enriches her livestreaming practice with an added temporal layer, rather than restructuring it so that it could align with real time. A live broadcast is made and watched precisely because it has been enacted as live, not because it corresponds with the temporalities of universal time via the technologies that remain faithful in ex-temporalizing time. Liveness does not happen in Time inasmuch as it happens in the enactments of itself – an enactment contingent on the moving pieces of liveness as a constellation. These varying experiences of “live” not only help the body reconfigure its being-in-time as instantly and readily replenished with meaning and activity, but also fill these otherwise temporal voids – experiences of pure temporality – with shifting webs of temporal sociality.

Even though user enactments of liveness might contrast with the kind of liveness enacted by engineers and computer scientists (see again, Raman et al., 2018), liveness is not fragmented into many. Engineering livestreaming into Facebook – a platform whose temporalities already oscillate between simultaneity and instantaneity thanks to the algorithms that organize its content and condition its participation – is a task inevitably informed by this oscillation. There is a reverberation of this oscillation on three different levels: on the livestreaming feature itself, within the platform, and in the downtimes of its users. The result of this reverberation is a radical recalibration of downtime with technology: one in which the body as sensory central reaches out to its mobile technology to actively reconfigure its being-in-time. In the specific case examined here, the body also took a leap of faith to direct its haptic and tactile explorations onto itself – living with technology in a recalibrated downtime has allowed the body to recognize itself also as an entity to be acted upon, to be reworked and renovated.

While not all recalibration will entail this reworking of the body, the case examined here has outlined how this leap of faith is made possible not so much because of the newness or uniqueness of the practice content or the liveness event, but rather because of the temporal reverberation of downtime and liveness as enactments of the body and its technology. In other words, it is neither the uniqueness of DC as a method nor the novelty of livestreaming strangers massaging each other using odd-looking tools that allow the practice of DC to gain traction: the content and the event of liveness are expendable, owing themselves to the temporal reverberation in time, technology, and the body. This reverberation also carves out a temporal space for practices and enactments that are shunned by temporal structures of institutions and society to thrive: after all, downtime comes into being in the fractures between the mismatches of temporal regimes. Downtime and the insistence it puts on the body, which could mobilize both the production and consumption of livestreaming, are an often overlooked aspect of livestreaming practices. In the “constellation of liveness” framework developed by van Es (2007), for example, liveness is a particular interaction between institutions, technologies, and people. It is through the analytical lens of downtime, as discussed in this article, that the mechanisms of how this interaction takes place can be traced. Enactments of liveness on Facebook is a result of temporal reverberations of downtime and liveness as enactments of the body and its technology, the result of which is a tactical temporal space that thrives at the margin of institutional temporal structures.

And yet there are inherent limits to this reverberation. The duration of liveness and downtime alike is limited, much like the finitude of lifetime. Recalibrating downtime in service of rescuing the present moment through engaging with liveness is but one of the many ways in which the body can reflect on its embedding in its lifetime – a reminder that clock time marches forward, unwavering. Quang recognized that his prostate cancer will eventually outrun his exercises, Thu recognized that she cannot out-generate tutorials for the growing conditions of her client base, and Lam recognized that at some point he will outgrow being the delivery boy for Thu’s group. Any temporary unity between the self and its being-in-time at the behest of technology is intervened by its conflicted longing for the durability of human existence, which reminds the self of its ultimate precarity and eventual decay. Constant recalibration of downtime through enacting liveness is a tactical cheat that is able to seize onto little triumphs in between the cracks of temporal clashes, but unable to keep any of them. The alternative temporal space created through the reverberation of downtime and liveness continues to thrive at the margin of more enduring temporal structures, even as it becomes front and center in the everyday lives of those relying on it for survival.