Understanding Memetic Media and Collective Identity Through Streamer Persona on Twitch.tv

Nathan J Jackson

doi:10.21153/psj2020vol6no2art966

Authors

Nathan J Jackson University of New South Wales, Australia http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2561-4178

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21153/psj2020vol6no2art966

Keywords:

livestreaming, persona, mimetic media, collective identity, performance, video games

Abstract

Video game livestreamers on the leading platform Twitch.tv present a carefully curated version of themselves - negotiated in part via interactions with their viewers - resulting in collectively performed personas centred around individual streamers. These collective personas emerge from a combination of live performance, platform features including streamer-specific emoticons and audiovisual overlays, the games that streamers play, and how they play them. In this paper, I interrogate how these elements culminate in a feedback loop between individual streamers and non-streamer participants, specifically how platform features mediate and facilitate interactions between users. I also examine streaming persona as both a product and expression of this dynamic and the subsequent emergence of streamer-based social arrangement and collective value systems. I do this with particular attention to how memes operate uniquely within the livestreaming mode.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biography

Nathan J Jackson, University of New South Wales, Australia

PhD Candidate, School of the Arts and Media

References

Among Us 2018, video game, Innersloth.

Animal Crossing: New Horizons 2020, video game, Nintendo.

Ask, K & Abidin, C 2018, ‘My life is a mess: self-deprecating relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues’, Information, Communication & Society, vol.21, no.6, pp.834–850.

Ask, K, Spilker, HS & Hansen, M 2019, ‘The politics of user-platform relationships: Co-scripting live-streaming on Twitch.tv’, First Monday, vol.24, no.7.

Bee Movie 2007, film, Paramount Pictures.

Bingham, CM 2020, ‘Talking about Twitch: Dropped Frames and a normative theory of new media production’, Convergence, vol.26, no.2, pp.269-286.

Cai, J & Wohn, DY 2019, ‘What are Effective Strategies of Handling Harassment on Twitch? Users’ Perspectives’, in Conference Companion Publication of the 2019 on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, pp.166-170.

Chen, C & Lin, Y 2018, ‘What drives live-stream usage intention? The perspectives of flow, entertainment, social interaction, and endorsement’, Telematics and Informatics, vol.35, no.1, pp.293-303.

Chess, S 2017, Ready Player Two: Women gamers and designed identity, University of Minnesota Press.

Consalvo, M 2017, ‘When paratexts becomes texts: de-centering the game-as-text’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol.24, no.2, pp.177-183.

—2018, ‘Kaceytron and transgressive play on Twitch.tv’, in K Jørgensen & F Karlsen (eds), Transgressions in Games and Play, MIT Press, pp.83-98.

Dawkins, R 2006[1976], The Selfish Gene: with a new Introduction by the Author, Oxford University Press.

Dream Daddy 2017, video game, Game Grumps.

Ford, C, Gardner, D, Horgan, LE, Liu, C, tsaasan, a.m., Nardi, B & Rickman, J 2017 ‘Chat Speed OP PogChamp: Practice of Coherence in Massive Twitch Chat’, in Proceedings of the 2017 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI, Denver, USA, pp.858-871.

Gal, N, Shifman, L & Kampf, Z 2016, ‘“It gets better”: Internet memes and the construction of collective identity’, New Media & Society, vol.18, no.8, pp.1698-1714.

Glitsos, L & Hall, J 2019, ‘The Pepe the Frog meme: an examination of social, political, and cultural implication through the tradition of the Darwinian Absurd’, Journal for Cultural Research, vol.23, no.4, pp.381-395.

Goffman, E 1956, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth London.

Gray, KL 2014, Race, Gender, and Deviance in Xbox Live: Theoretical Perspectives from the Virtual Margins, Anderson Publishing.

—2017, ‘“They’re just too urban”: Black gamers streaming on Twitch”, in J Daniels, K Gregory & T.M. Cottom (eds), Digital Sociologies, pp.355-368.

Hamilton, WA, Garretson, O, & Kerne, A 2014, ‘Streaming on Twitch: Fostering Participatory Communities of Play within Live Mixed Media’, in Proceedings of the 32nd annual ACM conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, ON, Canada, pp.1315-1324.

Hercules 1997, film, Disney.

Hilvert-Bruce, Z, Neill, JT, Sȷ̈oblom, M & Hamari, J 2018, ‘Social motivations of live-streaming viewer engagement on Twitch’, Computers in Human Behaviour, vol.84, pp.58-67.

Johnson, MR & Woodcock, J 2019, ‘“It’s like the gold rush”: the lives and careers of professional video game streamers on Twitch.tv’, Information, Communication & Society, vol.22, no.3, pp.336-351.

Jung, CG 1928, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology, Routledge.

Kingdom Hearts 3 2019, video game, Square Enix.

Literat, I & van den Berg, S 2019, ‘Buy memes low, sell memes high: Vernacular criticism and collective negotiations of value on Reddit’s Memeeconomy’, Information, Communication & Society, vol.22, no.2, pp.232-249.

Marshall, PD 2010, ‘The promotion and presentation of the self: Celebrity as marker of presentational media’, Celebrity Studies, vol.1, no.1, pp.35-48.

Marshall, PD, Moore, C & Barbour, K 2020, Persona Studies: An Introduction, John Wiley & Sons.

Marwick, AE 2013, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age, Yale University Press.

Milner, RM 2016, The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media, MIT Press.

Moore, C, Barbour, K, & Lee, K 2017, ‘Five dimensions of online persona’, Persona Studies, vol.3, no.1, pp.1-11.

My Neighbor Totoro 1988, film, Studio Ghibli.

Nissenbaum, A & Shifman, L 2017, ‘Internet memes as contested cultural capital: The case of 4chan’s /b/ board’, New Media & Society, vol.19, no.4, pp.483-501.

Partin, WC 2019, ‘Watch Me Pay: Twitch and the Cultural Economy of Surveillance’, Surveillance & Society, vol.17, no.1/2, pp.153-160.

Phillips, W & Milner, RM 2018, The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online, John Wiley & Sons.

Pokémon Red Version 1998, video game, Game Freak.

Scully-Blaker, R, Begy, J, Consalvo, M & Ganzon, S 2017, ‘Playing along and playing for on Twitch: Livestreaming from tandem play to performance’, in Proceedings of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, AIS, Hawaii, USA, pp.2026-2035.

Seering, J, Kraut, R & Dabbish, L 2017, ‘Shaping Pro and Anti-Social Behavior on Twitch Through Moderation and Example-Setting’, in Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing, ACM, Portland, USA, pp.2026-2035.

Senft, T 2008, Camgirls: Celebrity & Community in the Age of Social Networks, Peter Lang.

Shifman, L 2012, ‘An anatomy of a YouTube meme’, New Media & Society, vol.14, no.2, pp.187-203.

—2013, ‘Memes in a digital world: Reconciling with a conceptual troublemaker’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, vol.18, no.3, pp.362-377.

—2014, MIT Press Essential Knowledge: Memes in Digital Culture, MIT Press.

—2019, ‘Internet Memes and the Twofold Articulation of Values’, in M Graham & W.H. Dutton (eds), Society and the Internet: How Networks of Information and Communication are Changing Our Lives, pp.43-57.

Sȷ̈oblom, M & Hamari, J 2017, ‘Why do people watch others play video games? An empirical study on the motivations of Twitch users’, Computers in Human Behavior, vol.75, pp.985-996.

Sȷ̈oblom, M, Törhönen, M, Hamari, & Macey, J 2017, ‘Content structure is king: An empirical study on gratifications, game genres and content type on Twitch’, Computers in Human Behavior, vol.73, pp.161-171. —2019, ‘The ingredients of Twitch streaming: Affordances of game streams’, Computers in Human Behavior, vol.92, pp.20-28.

South Park: The Stick of Truth 2014, video game, Ubisoft.

Spitzberg, BH 2014, ‘Toward a model of meme diffusion (m3d)’, Communication Theory, vol.24, no.3, pp.311-339.

Stardew Valley 2016, video game, Chucklefish.

Tannen, D 2007, Talking Voices: Repetition, Dialogue, and Imagery in Conversational Discourse, Cambridge University Press.

Taylor, TL 2018, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming, Princeton University Press.

Toelken, B 1996, Dynamics of Folklore, University Press of Colorado.

Wiggins, BE & Bowers, GB 2015, ‘Memes as genre: A structurational analysis of the memescape’, New Media & Society, vol.17, no.11, pp.1886-1906.

Woodcock, J & Johnson, MR 2019, ‘The Affective Labor and Performance of Live Streaming on Twitch.tv’, Television & New Media, vol.20, no.8, pp.813-823.