Live-streaming and Spectatorship of Death
Conference Paper, 2017
Live-streaming is a relatively older technology that has been now been made accessible across various social media platforms. Significant in its shift from recording to real time, the popularity of live-streaming has resulted in a large number of users streaming a wide range of content and simultaneously interacting via comments. Generally seen as an advancement in communication technologies, the recent ‘trend’ of live-streaming suicides and crime has attracted criticism and concern towards the medium as well as the host digital platform. Equally alarming are the skewed numbers between the thousands of viewers that watch these live-streams and the the few viewers attempting to stop the violent acts in question.
This paper looks at spectatorship as a conflict between watching and acting. In her book Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag makes key arguments with respect to shock as a visual stimulus as well as the disconnection between experience and perception. Taking these arguments forward, this paper leverages emerging patterns in media anthropology in order to offer some tentative theories on the consumption of online content by examining the newly emergent trend of live-streaming suicides.