Digital Intimacy in Real Time
Bo Ruberg served as a guest editor with Johanna Brewer for the special issue in Television & New Media on gender and sexuality in live streaming. The article "Digital Intimacy in Real Time: Live Streaming Gender and Sexuality" co-published with Brewer serves as the guest editors’ introduction to the Television and New Media special issue.
An excerpt from the article:
"The contemporary landscape of digital media is increasingly entwined with the practice of live streaming—the act of broadcasting live content, typically including both video and audio, to an audience via the internet. Much live streamed content is produced by individuals, rather than large media corporations, some of whom stream as hobbyists and others as professionals. Live streaming content can include everything from the broadcasting of video game play to scenes of “social eating” to real-time erotic performances. Indeed, the umbrella of live streaming encompasses a vast and complex world of people expressing themselves, forming countercultures and counterpublics, and participating in (and resisting) systems of regulation and power that manifest through the politics of digital platforms. Scholar who explore live streaming will find much to unpack in this issue: new interplays between the body and media, new ways that mediated longings are being made manifest, and new tensions between visibility and pushback for people who are marginalized due to gender, sexuality, race, disability, body type, and more. They will also find modes of media creation, consumption, and participation that strikingly resemble what has come before, shedding new light on the history of digital media as well as its present."
To read the full article, please visit here.