Live streaming and the perils of proximity

This essay aims to disturb the popular (and sometimes critical) claim that the primary utility of live streaming’s particular set of affordances is the collapsing of distance and creation of proximity. While critiquing claims for transparency and immediacy made for various representational and communicative media is a standard, not an innovative, move within media and performance studies, promises of live streaming’s affinity for eliding distance and conjuring proximity seem interestingly resistant to the critical skepticism that often attends claims of immediacy more generally. In foregrounding the tendency to characterize live streaming by relying on iterations of previous claims made for television and participatory social media, I hope to add some urgency to the project of theorizing live streaming according to its own, emerging collection of affordances and practices. Perhaps more importantly, I advocate for critical voices to attend specifically to the ways in which live streaming and live streams necessarily, and potentially usefully, encode distance, difference, and separation.