Curating the Real-time: Classification Labor in Chinese E-commerce Live-streaming

• In Event: 50220 - Section on Organizations, Occupations, and Work Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 1: Technology and Platform Work

Abstract

Curation, once the domain of professional curators, has now become an intensive form of platform labor. Real-time, a dominant temporality presented in digital commercial platforms, is often analyzed from a technical standpoint as a linear flow. However, this study argues that real-time is actively curated in Chinese e-commerce live-streaming. Based on four months of ethnographic fieldwork at MCN Kite, this research examines fashion influencer Yuki's 13-hour live-streaming session as a commercial media event. Through the laborers' classification practices from selection and organization to rehearsal, they curate a seamless real-time experience during the live-streaming session. However, behind this frontstage performance, MCN laborers navigate a turbulent timeline characterized by disruptions and fragmented coordination. Notably, there is a tension between the ideal objectives of the platform, brands, and influencers, and the daily practices of curation labor, revealing how laborers balance, implement, and appropriate wills of these actors to curate the real-time in contested temporalities. Although laborers strategically manage these pressures, they ultimately reproduce the power asymmetries. By framing real-time as a constructed labor rather than a technical inevitability, this study sheds light on the specific classification work within cultural production and the precarious working conditions that underpin platform economies, contributing to ongoing debates around curation labor and temporal power.

Authors

• Qiheng Lin, Renmin University of China

• George Ran Zhao, Renmin University of China