“An unexamined life is not worth living.”
–Michael Gerry, the guy who livestreamed his entire life for a whole year
Since the garage band Severe Tire Damage did the first internet livestream back in 1993 (a very low image resolution stream that used half of the entire Internet bandwidth at the time), this online technology has come a long way, becoming a prominent feature in all of the main social media platforms, and even having entire websites dedicated to media broadcasting, such as Twitch, which enjoys over 15 million daily active users.
Livestreaming offers raw, unedited content, which opposes what most social media users prefer: an edited highlight reel version of their lives. Thus, not many are willing to broadcast live on social media, so this feature tends to be used mostly by media personalities. Highlight-reel sharing continues to be the preferred method in which most decide to satisfy the basic human need of expressing our place in the social world. Is it likely, though, that this preference will ever change? How crazy is it to think of an unedited and raw expression of our place in society becoming the preferred method of communication in the future?
Extreme Cases of Livestreaming
Some personalities have made use of this medium in such a way some would consider extreme. In 2017, Katy Perry did a nonstop 4-day YouTube livestream as part of the promotion of her album Witness. The stream followed the superstar inside a theater-style house in which people could see her during different activities. But a 4-day livestream falls short when compared to Twitch streamer Louis ‘LosPollosTV,’ who livestreamed for over 162 hours.
However, these two cases do not fully represent the rawness potential of livestreaming: the activities that Katy Perry carried out were most likely previously planned, thus they wouldn’t represent a typical day in the life of the singer. In Louis’s case, the stream only captured him in front of his computer playing video games and interacting with his audience in between short periods of naps.
A very different case was the one of BuzzFeed’s Aria Inthavong, who livestreamed a whole week of his life in 2018. Although his everyday activities were for the most part conventional, he would attempt to make them as entertaining as possible, influenced by the in-real-time feedback he was receiving in the YouTube chat.
A rawer case (although in lower resolution) of “lifestreaming” was the one of the founder of Twitch, Justin Kan, whom back in 2007 livestreamed his everyday life with a webcam attached to his head 24–7, for about 8 months, through his website JustinTV.Com, which later became the biggest internet broadcasting platform at the time.
The Case of Michael Gerry
Michael Gerry carried out the most extreme case of lifestreaming until this day in 2019, which lasted for the entire year. He even included bathroom breaks in the last three months of the project.
Gerry was not a famous popstar promoting an album, nor an entrepreneur testing new technologies; he was not even a social media personality at the time. He was just a regular 22-year-old guy going through existential struggles like many others around that age. Then, in December 2018, months after Aria had done his own lifestreaming experiment, Gerry uploads a video to his YouTube channel titled ‘Livestreaming Announcement Manifesto.’ In that unedited footage, Gerry declares his intention of livestreaming his whole life for an entire year, expressing his feelings of having been living a false life, been lied to by religion, and opposing to the idea, enhanced by social media, of wanting always to show the “best” edited version of yourself..
Gerry’s project did not go viral and had very little media coverage. Currently, he only has 6.7k subscribers on YouTube and 1.2k followers on Twitch. However, Gerry did not attempt to make his live content “entertaining” and rather stuck to his original idea of expressing himself in the rawest and most honest way possible all the way through. In a culture that values instant gratification and, as mentioned above, a highlight-reel depiction of people’s lives, a project like Gerry’s was bound to not generate much attention other than from the small niche audience he attracted. It would’ve been a different story if a well-known media personality attempted the same experiment. Social media influencers get paid for the time they spend sharing aspects of themselves to their audiences, and given the cases above, it may not be too crazy to think that one of the “big ones” will someday decide to embark in lifestreaming on a Michael Gerry level, or even higher.
So what’s the likelihood of the rawness of lifestreaming becoming a new normal someday?
With new generations seeking validation by quantifying their self-worth with likes and followers, it seems like nothing that we do, experience, or accomplish matters if there’s no big audience to witness it.
We all have wondered at one point what our favorite media personality is doing at any given point in time. This “demand” has been met to a certain degree with social media. So if we assume that today’s big influencers/celebrities will eventually embark on an “extreme” form of lifestreaming, it would only be a matter of time for the rest, non-famous people, to follow suit. Or, in other words, it would only be a matter of time for the demand that comes out of wondering what our personal acquaintances are doing at any given point in time is met.
A Future Where Privacy is an Outdated Concept
Certainly, such a world would look like one out of a Black Mirror episode. Imagine being inside a nonstop livestream that follows you everywhere, opened for the whole world to access it. Maybe you’ve been inside of it since the moment you were born because your parents decided they would be “Family Lifestreamers” (the raw version of “Family Vloggers”). Plus, lifestreaming has been a thing for years before you were born, so by the time you’ve grown up, the lack of privacy does not bother you at all. It was always there; you don’t know anything else. You were born in a world in which privacy has become an outdated concept.
A very interesting take on the Michael Gerry project was the one of therapist Jeanie Y. Chang, who according to an Insider article, commented on the effect the project could’ve had on Gerry’s mental health, saying that “perhaps in his case, livestreaming and constant interaction with people helped him feel less isolated.”
Now, in our world, picture a Twitch-like chat feature in this livestream that follows us, in which our audience can comment and even make donations. Just like in Aria’s case, in which he felt the need to be entertaining, our audience could make life decisions for us, to the point where they replace our thoughts in exchange for us not experiencing isolation ever again in our lives. Humanity’s social brain is finally satisfied.
