Precarious Hours: Contingency and the Temporality of Live Streaming

This essay theorizes about the temporality of online live streaming, which has gained global popularity in the last decade. Against an explosion of online digital media, live streaming competes for user attention and pursues long durations of engagement. How does live streaming shape contemporary experiences of time? How is live streaming situated in the temporal economy of neoliberal capitalism? This article unravels the appeal of live streaming through the central notion of contingency, which not only characterizes the temporal experience of live streaming but also connects it to widespread conditions of precarity that streamers frequently display on-screen. By analyzing three documentary films about Chinese live streamers, the article shows that, engaging in highly gendered relational labor on- and off-screen, streamers strive to entrepreneurialize time but easily get stuck in a protracted present in which time is wasted in the struggle for upward mobility.