How is Streamer Culture Shaping Gen Alpha?
I was talking to a friend about Generation Alpha in the car the other day, and she told me about a conversation she had with her seven-year old nephew. She had asked him what his favorite cartoons are, to which he replied, “what’s a cartoon?” Rather than sitting down and watching traditional TV, he prefers to watch videos on YouTube and YouTube shorts, particularly live streamers like IShowSpeed and Kai Cenat.
After talking with my friend, I became increasingly curious about how live streaming had become so popular with younger audiences in recent years. Gen Alpha is already taking in information differently than previous generations. The emphasis on short-form content has changed the way that digital information is being processed. With short form media like TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts becoming increasingly popular, attention spans are lowering.
In an article titled Accerlerating Dynamics of Collective Attention, researchers studied the effects of “increasing production and consumption of content.” They found that “the ever-present competition for recency and the abundance of information leads to the squeezing of more topics in the same time intervals as the result of limitations of the available collective attention.” But if short-form content is thriving, and attention spans are lowering, why has long-form live streaming caught the attention of Gen-Alpha?
To get some answers, I turned to IShowSpeed, a creator also known as Darren Watkins. With 2.6M followers on Twitch, 43.9M on TikTok and 45.7M on YouTube, Watkins is globally recognized as one of the most popular and influential content creators right now. He is known for his elongated live streams on both Twitch and YouTube where he streams for hours – sometimes over the course of multiple days. Watkins also does tours, which he streams on his channels as well. His most recent tour, called Speed Does America, was a 30-day 24/7 livestream which showed Speed and his crew as he traveled across the United States and visited different locations recommended by viewers.
In an interview for Dazed Digital by Nicolaia Rips, Rips talks about how Watkins is able to keep viewers engaged and watching for multiple hours at a time. “Part of what makes a Twitch streamer successful is their ability to entertain, to punctuate the stream with a moment that will live on, a bite-sized clip to disseminate around the web. How do you make someone tune in for five hours of talking? Ramp up the stunts, the shock factor, constantly come up with new things to do. There’s an adrenaline rush watching Watkins’ streams. His humour alternates between bloviating, barking and freaking out.” Watkins’ absurd and energetic humor is what keeps viewers coming back, and his physical comedy works especially well with younger audiences.
Since Watkins’ main form of content is streaming, much of his life is monitored by his fans. Watkins says, “As a streamer I have to be aware of the time. When I’m doing this, when I’m doing that. That’s all my memories now. All my memories are streaming. It’s so hard for me to remember stuff that I did before streaming. I feel like my memory box is so full of my YouTube career...”. Although he has the agency to press the record button, Watkins has taken on a job that limits personal privacy. There is little that viewers don’t observe about his life. He is filming himself so often that consistent viewers begin to feel like they know him personally, which is a driving factor for his popularity.
When he decides not to stream, his viewers often become frustrated. Watkins says, “They just hate when I don’t stream. They do riots and stuff. They say I’m lazy and I don’t care and I lost motivation.” While he streams, he also engages with viewer’s live comments. This feature gives the viewers some agency and allows them to interact with Watkins which adds another layer to the parasocial relationship streaming creates.
Another popular creator, Kai Cenat – the most followed Twitch streamer at over 20 million followers – also capitalizes off of this constant engagement. Oftentimes, Kai Cenat will live stream while on tour and grant the “chat” (i.e., the viewers) the ability to dictate where they go. While this creates a unique experience for the viewer, it also creates potential danger for these creators. They arrive at locations live, often with no preparation. This causes swarms of fans, traffic, and sometimes leads to the creators being trapped or enclosed in establishments because crowds become uncontrollable.
The excitement created as a result of unpredictability, the wild and exaggerated reactions, the constant engagement; these are the qualities that seem to make live streaming so profitable and effective, especially for younger viewers who desire constant entertainment.
While this formula is profitable for creators like IShowSpeed, the information that young viewers get out of watching these streams is not educational or informational in the way that many cartoons or traditional television for children is meant to be. Since these streams are put on by individual creators, these creators hold all of the power when it comes to deciding what they care to talk about – or not.
Streams are live. There are no cuts, there are no retakes, and censorship is less rigid. It’s almost like going on an adventure with a friend. While wildly popular, streaming’s informality and unabashed authenticity seems to be blurring the lines between real human interaction and online interaction in a way that could pose a potential threat to the social development of Gen Alpha.
Sources:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-09311-w#Sec8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHCVsSLLi4E
Cover Photo: Martin Garcia/ESPAT Media/Getty Images