Learning Through the Sociopolitical Dimensions of Twitch: Young People as Historical Actors With Live-Stream Media

• In Event: Designing Live-Streaming Ecologies: Learning in and Across Synchronous Media

Abstract

This paper explores how young people leverage live-streaming media to position themselves as historical actors (authors, 2019) that challenge hegemonic discourses in their online activity. Specifically, the paper examines how young people leverage the Twitch platform to document current events and foster political discourse on their respective Twitch channels. The study highlights how live-streaming platforms provide pivotal contexts for understanding how young people blend their everyday political realities with digital public spaces. Moreover, the paper explores how young people’s movement in-and-across digital spaces or what we term transmedia activity, expands how young people read and author the world with their media production. Along these lines, the paper aims to highlight how young people and educators can collaborate to historicize, critique, and transform political discourse in everyday online environments.

Drawing on notions of transmedia mobilization (Constanza-Chock, 2014) as well as the process of becoming historical actors (authors, 2019) this study aims to develop deep analyses for how young people engage in the sociopolitical dimensions of learning through live-streaming media production. We are interested in how young people leverage analogue and digital tools to challenge deficit and violent discourses that crystallize around non-dominant communities in virtual ecologies. Moreover, through our online participatory ethnography, we detail how young people’s localized events, when documented and distributed, can become sparks for global change.

This paper draws on an online digital ethnographic approach to study how four youth Twitch streamers designed Twitch channels that allowed other young people to engage in political discourse about their sociohistorical lives. Moreover, the researchers in this paper moved in-and-across data platforms to trace how the discourses that emerged in the four Twitch channels sparked political discourse that moved across various websites.

The data for this paper draws on observations we made through our online digital ethnography as we participated on the four channels we studied. Moreover, through content analyses of news articles on Reddit, Twitch, and twitter, we explore how the young people in our study leveraged their live-streaming platforms to challenge oppressive discourses. Finally, through video analyses of the respective channels, we also observed how the Twitch streamers in our study designed spaces that felt “safer” for other players from non-dominant communities.

This paper provides a lens for how young people learn about politics in the everyday through their media engagement. We also explore how live-streaming services are transforming how young people engage with politics in their everyday lives. Given that Twitch is often seen as a place where young people focus on video game play, this study has implications for how in contexts of play, young people nonetheless engage and transform ideologies about themselves and their communities. Finally, the study provides contexts for how educators can collaborate with young people through live-streaming services to design more equitable online spaces.

Authors

• Edward Rivero, University of California - Berkeley

• Sandra Jacobo, University of California - Berkeley

• Jasmine Ayromlou