Twitch and the Cultural Economy of Surveillance
In this blog post, William Clyde Partin sketches the contributions of his article “Watch Me Pay: Twitch and the Cultural Economy of Surveillance,” which was recently published in Surveillance & Society.
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“Watch Me Pay” comes from my long-term interest in surveillance studies, on the one hand, and the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform, Twitch, on the other. If you’re not familiar with Twitch, it’s a user-generated content site where content creators stream a live video feed, usually of video game play, from their home computer. Just as YouTube (and YouTubers) worked to professionalize the labor of content creators through various monetization schemes, Twitch has introduced a range of techniques for streamers (and itself) to turn the labor of livestreaming into a paying gig. Twitch doesn’t have the cultural visibility of, say, YouTube, but Twitch has a massive user base all the same (ask any teenager), with millions of broadcasters producing billions of hours of content. Twitch, then, occupies an interesting position — more than niche, less than mainstream; known, but not quite ubiquitous.
In any case, many scholars — especially younger ones, who (like me) were Twitch enthusiasts before they were Twitch researchers — are turning to Twitch as a paradigmatic example of cultural production in the age of platform capitalism. Lots of fields, from HCI to sociology to media psychology to communication, are bringing their disciplinary perspectives to bear on Twitch. For the most part, though, this literature doesn’t engage surveillance directly, even though I suspect that just about everyone writing about Twitch would recognize that surveillance is vital to how the platform functions. Thus, in “Watch Me Pay,” I wanted to ask a pair of related, high-level questions: What can surveillance studies reveal about Twitch as a platform, and what can Twitch, as a platform, reveal about surveillance studies?
To do that, in “Watch Me Pay,” I try to think about various surveillant practices and performances undertaken by the three primary stakeholders in the Twitch ecosystem: the audience, streamers, and Twitch itself. Each actor is afforded various ways of acting, enabled and constrained by the affordances of Twitch as a modular technical architecture, that shape how they are able to see and, in turn, be seen. None of the action I describe would be particularly novel to anyone familiar with Twitch; however, running them through the sieve of surveillance studies offers some novel insights.
On the first question (i.e. “what surveillance studies can do for Twitch”), surveillance studies is adept at asking questions about seeing and being seen, as well as how visibility is often tied to political economies. One goal of “Watch Me Pay” is thus to encourage scholars to see that many of the ways that audience members look to make themselves more visible — e.g. subscriptions and donations, both of which create on-air notifications or elicit comments from the streamer — are bound up with how both streamers and Twitch monetize the labor of livestreaming. Questions about audience labor, competition between streamers, and platform governance cannot be bracketed off from questions about political economy. The flow of capital (usually upward) is a vital aspect of the composition of organic bodies, social processes, and technical objects that, together, constitute the assemblage of networked broadcasting (to use TL Taylor’s term in her book, Watch Me Play).
Surveillance — including and especially platform surveillance — is always in the plural and must always be situated in its political, economic, and cultural context.
At the same time, and in keeping with this special issue’s theme, platform surveillance, I wanted to see what Twitch could add to surveillance studies and platform studies more broadly. As surveillance studies has moved away from panoptic and state-centered approaches to surveillance practices, scholars in the field have become more attuned to the vast field of possible surveillant relations, be they lateral, sousveillance, social, synoptic, panoptic, etc. Much of this reconsideration has been pushed by the rise of social media services, which challenged the top-down formulations of surveillance that dominated the field from the 1970s on. Twitch is a useful example on this point: by cataloguing the range of surveillance practices undertaken by a range of actors on the platform, it’s a reminder that surveillance — including and especially platform surveillance — is always in the plural and must always be situated in its political, economic, and cultural context.
