Bo Ruberg Publishes on Livestreaming from the Bedroom
BCNM alum Bo Ruberg published a paper titled "Livestreaming from the bedroom: Performing intimacy through domestic space on Twitch" with Daniel Lark in Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies. The paper focuses on the growing use of the bedroom and home space for streaming content online.
From the abstract:
The presence of bedrooms on Twitch also breaks down along gender lines, with women streaming being far more likely to broadcast from their bedrooms than men. Here, we build from existing research on both livestreaming and digital placemaking to argue for an understanding of place on Twitch as fundamentally performative. This performance is inherently gendered and bound up with the affective labor of streaming. In addition, we demonstrate how the bedroom, even when it does not appear on screen, can be understood as a ‘structuring logic’ of placemaking on Twitch. Given the history of livestreaming, which grows out of women’s experiments with online ‘lifecasting’, the bedroom sets expectations for the type of spatial and emotional access a stream is imagined to offer viewers. In this sense, the absence of bedrooms in gaming streams can be understood as a disavowal of intimate domestic space: an attempt by predominantly male streamers to distance themselves from the implicit parallels between livestreaming and practices like webcam modeling.
Read the entire paper here!