Liveness redux: on media and their claim to be live

• Published in: Media, culture & society Vol. 39; no. 8; pp. 1245 - 1256
• Main Author: van Es, Karin
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London, England SAGE Publications 01.11.2017; Sage Publications Ltd
• Subjects: Crosscurrents; Everyday life; Mass media; Mass media effects; Meaning; Phenomenology; Popular culture; Rhetoric; Social media; Social networks; Television; Television broadcasting; institutions; symbolic power; broadcast media; liveness; myth of the mediated centre; live tv; social media
• ISSN: 0163-4437; 1460-3675; 1460-3675
• DOI: 10.1177/0163443717717633

Increasingly media are asserting themselves as live. In television, this has been an important strategy and recently it has been employed by new media platforms such as Facebook, Periscope and Snapchat. This commentary explains the revival of live media by exploring the meaning and operations of the concept and argues the continued relevance of the concept for the study of social media. Traditionally, there have been three main approaches to the live in academic writing (i.e. liveness as ontology, as phenomenology and as rhetoric): each has its particular shortcoming. This paper proposes that it is more productive to understand the live as a construction that assists to secure media a central role in everyday life.