Articles by Kelsey Cummings

Kelsey Cummings is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at Christopher Newport University. Her research on new media and identity has been published in the journals Television & New Media, Feminist Media Studies, Social Media + Society, Studies in the Fantastic, Global Storytelling: Journal of Digital and Moving Images, and Transformative Works and Cultures.

“Help Them Keep Doing What They’re Doing”: Intersections of Agency, Affect, and Capital in the Twitch Subscription System

Twitch.tv booth at the 2018 PAX West at the Washington State Convention Center in Seattle, Washington. Photo courtesy of Gage Skidmore (CC BY-SA 2.0)
By Kelsey Cummings

With live streaming capabilities becoming increasingly important to the success of social media applications and representing central modes of engagement for popular digital platforms, the economic and socio-political functions of live streaming are critical to an understanding of changing new media landscapes. The existing scholarship on Twitch and similar live streaming platforms has demonstrated the importance of both financial investments and affective labor to these digital spaces. Building from existing scholarship, this article will apply a critical-cultural lens to analyze the ways in which Twitch’s interface mediates users’ agency through mechanics centered on affect, capital, and their intersections. How do emotional intimacies manifest across the design of the Twitch subscription system? How does Twitch incentivize live streaming subscriptions for both viewers and creators via design choices? What does this mean for an understanding of the affective investments that users have in live streaming more broadly speaking? Through an examination of the design-based affordances of live streaming on Twitch, I ask how these capabilities (to pay streamers via subscriptions and gift systems as well as to follow, comment, and otherwise engage) reflect the varying ways that intimacy is both created and understood in live streaming contexts. This work will contribute to an understanding of the affective investments that users have, express, and create across various new media platforms. It will particularly focus on how affective labor is both compensated and obfuscated via systems like the Twitch subscription.