MTV TEEN
At 15, I was the only one in my family who would eat lunch at 2 pm. Going to school in another city, by the time I would get off the bus and walk home, the rest of my family was done with lunch and either back to work (my parents) or doing their homework (my brother – although I’m pretty sure he was pretending to).
Thankfully, this was no problem for me, and rather the opposite, because it meant I could just turn on MTV and watch my favorite guilty pleasure at the time: Geordie Shore. I don’t know if it was their funny accents, the outlandishness of the situations depicted on the screen, or the mere act of rebelliousness of watching what my parents considered “trash tv”.
Reality TV for me really feels like one of the key ingredients for the early 2010s, and it’s not like it stopped there – Love Island and Too Hot to Handle are more modern variants of the same basic premise, despite the goals and aims of the participants being different.
However, it is no news that the new generations barely watch cable TV, and when they do turn it on, it is mostly to watch on-demand services, such as Netflix, Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. Even then, however, only a small percentage of young consumers is able to fully commit their attention to the big screen, with a whopping 88% multitasking when enjoying longer forms of video contents, such as TV shows or movies. It is no mystery that our attention span is getting shorter and shorter, and the new generation simply does not have the mental capacity to sit down on the couch at the same time once or multiple times a week to see poor decision-making by 20something year olds.
So how do we make up for it?
THE TWITCH EPIDEMIC
Especially after the Coronavirus pandemic, a great number of internet users turned to livestreaming as source of entertainment, mindlessly tuning in on people showcasing themselves playing videogames, making music, just talking to the ever present “chat” or also just carving wood. Twitch.tv is currently the biggest platform that offers this type of content, with an average of 2 million users tuning in every day. This is already a rather large viewer base, that however does not even compare to the actual total hours streamed, which average around 2 million on the daily. Such a large output cannot possibly be kept up with in its entirety, and to facilitate the spreading of funny, gross, scandalous and weird moments, the platform created the clipping tool for the streams.
insert clip of a guy literally just carving wood here because WordPress won’t let me embed a Twitch clip 🙁
CLIP IT AND SHIP IT
Livestreamfail, also known as LSF, is a prolific subreddit where people can share these “clips” of streams that have passed. By sharing it to a community of 1.6 million users, the spreading of these clips, ranging anywhere from 5 to 60 seconds in duration, can easily reach way wider audiences than a streamer’s own viewership.
One of the main issues with this tool, however, is the ease at which the context of anything that is being said gets forgotten or discarded. By cutting down a 5-hour stream, or even just a normal conversation within it, into a 30-second clip, the same context in which anything was said is easily omitted, either willfully or involuntarily.
Nonetheless, this method of sharing opinions and events that happened while on the air is more than ever popular, and allowing for what could be considered a new type of reality tv to slowly enter the mainstream.
THE SEPT. 22 EVENTS
XQC is probably the most successful streamer on twitch, surpassing by many hours in watch-time all other content creators and always showing up in the global top 5 Twitch accounts by followers, earnings and subscribers. A big guy, that basically lives on stream, in front of tens of thousands of people. After dating for more than a year, he and his girlfriend decided to break up. Which is normal. What can be considered less normal, however, is deciding to broadcast a 2-hour conversation with said ex-girlfriend, sharing details of the reasons behind the separation, crying and seemingly throwing nasty words at each other. In front of hundreds of thousands, that then become millions if we count thew reach of the many clips that were shared from this livestream.
All of this with viewers commenting live as it happened, chiming in with opinions based on merely what they could see in the moment, taking sides and attacking and defending accordingly. A real digital bloodbath.
MY SILLY THOUGHTS
As I see it, the main issue with this whole situation was not really the fact that this happened live: it really is not that different from classic reality TV – if anything, I have seen worse on Big Brother. Rather, it is the fact that while I always perceived television as something different and separate from myself, the internet used to feel different. When I am on social media, I make my own account, and to comment or say anything I have to show my face and name – it is inherently more personal, it involves you directly. Despite being a broadcasting app, Twitch does require you to make an account to view and interact with its content, and while most of these accounts are anonymous, the medium through which people interact is the same. Yes, my name and surname are not on there, but it is still me behind my keyboard interacting with some very personal events that are going on with very real people.
I’m left to wonder whether my own phone and computer are becoming the same detached medium that used to be the television, or rather, reality TV and entertainment are themselves becoming closer and closer to me as a person.
My sources – I have a personal strife with footnotes in html
Gen Z’s changing TV habits: https://www.decisionlab.co/blog/yes-the-internet-is-redefining-gen-zs-tv-habits
Clip of literally just a guy carving wood: https://www.twitch.tv/broxh_/clip/ArtisticBetterSnailPeoplesChamp
Viewer statistics for Twitch.tv: https://twitchtracker.com/statistics/viewers
Streaming hours statistics for Twitch.tv: https://twitchtracker.com/statistics/stream-time
LSF and more cringe on reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/LivestreamFail/
A clip, originally from Jerma985, retrieved from LSF Bank on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO4FMcVkmpA
Information on top streamers in 2022: https://www.theloadout.com/streamers/biggest-streamers
Thank you for writing this post. I didn’t have a TV in my house until I was 16, and then I would say it really blocked me from many “toxic” contents in a good way. But I also noticed my ideology is less easily accepting diversity, probably because I only received information that fits my social status and value since I was a kid. This also very relevant to my preferences to watching Youtube(sorry I don’t use twitch but I did watch some recordings of live streams through Youtube), I’d say it is more specific and I still not very use to watching news-related topic; it is always something related to the field I’m already familiar.
^ Like I’d say it’s not so good as a thing to be less easy to accept opinions that are different from me
‘Broadcast yourself’ Youtube said, and so we did. What you illustrate, our collision of the personal with global, is worrisome and fascinating. Right now it may seem that some people, like the famous streamer Xqc, share their entire self on the net, but I wonder if that is to change over time. Will a new generation of adults that have only grown up with the internet being huge share their all online, or will they self curate; always living in restraint for the fear of widespread publication.