Live Streaming Media: From Tencent to Tik Tok

3 units

Streaming media—binge-worthy serials, viral short videos, interactive livestreams, and microdramas—has become a dominant mode of contemporary media consumption. But what does it mean to “stream”? How do streaming platforms reshape viewing experiences through their infrastructures (networks, interfaces, and data), their business models, and their algorithmic systems of recommendation? And how are streaming media reorganizing our sense of time, attention, and affect while transforming (and competing with) other time-based media such as cinema, broadcast television, video games, and networked computing? Focusing on major Chinese platforms—long-form services such as iQiyi and Tencent Video; short-form video and livestream platforms such as Douyin/TikTok and Kuaishou; and emerging microdrama apps—this course examines (live)streaming media in China and its global entanglements in the US, Southeast Asia, and etc. We will work through key concepts including liveness, flow, shortness, attention economy, and algorithmic curation to analyze how platforms design engagement and monetize participation. Across case studies, students will investigate evolving narrative and visual strategies, mobile viewing habits (such as speed-watching), livestream commerce, and the social worlds these media both reflect and actively produce. The course also asks how streaming becomes a training ground for—and sometimes an escape from—contemporary realities: platform labor and work culture, romantic fantasies, rural–urban relations, historical memory, and future anxieties. Students will have opportunities to analyze these digital media phenomena critically through analytical writing and also to explore them creatively through media-making projects. Fulfills modern elective for EALC major.