Abstract
What it means for something to be ‘live’ is the kind of apparently simple question that becomes more intriguing, complex and unwieldy as it unfolds. Of course, these are the very best kinds of questions. Press just a little and the one question becomes many: Does liveness oppose something already made or completed? Is it located uniquely in time or space? Is it dependent on the audience, the context and the available technology?
For students and researchers of communication and mass media, liveness takes on additional dimensions as a mechanism by which we have historically endeavoured to distinguish that which is ‘mediated’ from that which is ‘real’, ‘authentic’ or ‘present’. The possibilities for liveness in the age of new and social media contribute significantly to the erosion of this distinction. Liveness, in other words, is a wonderful, productive mess.
In The Future of Live, Karin van Es approaches this concept by advocating a syncretic framework for understanding liveness which draws together previous ontological, phenomenological and rhetorical approaches to the subject.
The ‘Introduction’ and Chapter 1 provide numerous examples ranging from traditional performances, simultaneous broadcasts, sporting events, live radio, television broadcasting and awards programmes, to the ways in which social media are incorporated into these. van Es also clearly lays out how liveness has been theorized as primarily an ontological (technological) issue, a phenomenological one (as a matter of audience experience) or rhetorically (as a set of deliberate strategies by producers to manufacture the illusion of ‘natural’ liveness for commercial purposes). van Es’ thesis, that liveness is ‘a construction, a product of the interaction among institutions, technologies and users/viewers’ (p. 5), allows her to thoughtfully engage with, rather than avoid, the paradoxes, discontinuities and contradictions which emerge as she examines liveness in four cases.
Chapter 2 articulates the interaction of metatext, spaces of participation and user responses to liveness which shape van Es’ textual analyses. For each instance of ‘live’ presented in the case studies, van Es begins by examining the metatext, the collection of instructions, clues and articulations which circulate around the instance of the live to instruct users and viewers about its values, intentions and context. By analysing ‘information provided on the platform’s website, particular features of the platform itself […] promotional materials, press releases, and interviews with representatives of the platform’ (p. 29), van Es is able to investigate how the producers of liveness rhetorically articulate the intended meaning and consequences of liveness they envision for their products.
van Es’ second point of entry is through each platform’s ‘space of participation’, the various (authorized and unauthorized) ways in which users experience an instance of the live. Drawing on Müller (2009), van Es argues that these possibilities are shaped by technocultural forces (affordances, constraints and norms), economic forces (the necessity of media institutions to produce revenues) and legal forces (agreement users and producers negotiate about how liveness can be experienced). Centring as it does on how a platform shapes user experience, this point of entry reflects the ontological approach to liveness.
Addressing the phenomenological perspective on liveness, van Es’ third approach is to analyse user responses to platforms’ claims and construction of liveness by scouring user comments on webpages, in platform forums, in Tweets and in Facebook feeds.
Having established the complexities of liveness, as well as her overall framework for analysis, van Es’ subsequent chapters each explore an instance of liveness by examining the metatext, spaces of participation, and user responses surrounding Livestream, eJamming, the Voice and Facebook newsfeeds.
The first case examines the transformation of the live-streaming web-broadcaster Livestream (once Mogulus) between 2007 and the present. This is the most satisfying of the book’s four cases, as it introduces several paradoxes which persist throughout the book, particularly that liveness is intensively produced to appear ‘natural’. It also introduces the themes of interactivity, aesthetics, urgency and profitability as they apply to the sphere of new and social media, and explores the difficulties companies have had in positioning themselves in a period of technocultural, economic and legal flux. The discussion of how Livestream became monetized and professionalized over time directly supports van Es’ claims about the use of liveness to reinforce and re-entrench traditional values and power dynamics in media industries.
The second case examines eJamming, an online platform designed to facilitate real-time collaboration by musicians. van Es’ three-part analytical structure neatly teases out the contradictions between the promise of liveness offered in the metatext and the technical challenges the platform faced in meeting user expectations. In this case, the problem of latency emerges as a fascinating narrative about how technological structures can interrupt the feeling of immediacy and instantaneity for users. This chapter also introduces the role of sociability in the definition of liveness and becomes the germ for an argument made at the end of the book that liveness is conditioned to some degree on the ‘special relationship between real time and sociality’ (p. 114).
The third case introduces a typology for examining the ways in which social media interact with live broadcasts (as extensions, overlays, envelopes and through integration) and applies this to the competition show The Voice. Digging again into the tensions inherent in the concept of liveness, this case unearths contradictions between programming decisions motivated by economic concerns (the decision to delay broadcast of the live portions of the programme for West Coast audiences) and those motivated by the exploitation of the value of liveness (the encouragement by the producers for West Coast viewers to engage in social media activity which would ultimately ‘spoil’ the results of the programme for them). The way in which these contrasting imperatives rub against one another is intriguing and well-handled.
The fourth and final case looks at how Facebook has managed users’ experiences of the live through changes in their newsfeeds. This chapter engages well with the issues around legal frameworks which establish Facebook’s privacy standards and how algorithmic decisions influence our perceptions of our networks, as well as the tensions users experience in their quest to know more about others while also safeguarding their own privacy. However, this case reveals less about the ‘live’ than the others and constitutes something of a (nonetheless engaging and informative) misfit with the central argument of the rest of the book. It does, however, provide an indication of van Es’ larger research programme (see, for example, her 2017 edited collection with Mirko Tobias Schäfer, The Datafied Society).
The conclusion clearly rearticulates the book’s thesis – that liveness is a productive construction made possible by the interactions of institutions, platforms, users and social contexts. The cases largely contribute to supporting this claim and provide triangulation by highlighting distinct aspects of liveness. On the whole, the book deftly imposes a tentative order on a complex and wide-ranging set of issues without enforcing an arbitrary boundary or set of immutable rules. While the text falls somewhat short in answering the difficult question posed by its title (what is the future of live?), it is nonetheless effective in introducing advanced students and mass media researchers to the complexities of liveness, and itself makes a lively contribution to the field.