Our group’s work focuses on a particular kind of intimate relationship — that between live-streamers and their audiences. In today’s world of highly developed internet and social media, the internet has reshaped a great deal, and many relationship models have changed and been reinvented alongside it. The way intimacy is communicated is one such change, and it is precisely this that our work sets out to explore.

Online platforms and social media are powerful — they seem capable of accommodating all kinds of emotional and relational forms. But is that really the case? It is evident, from our work, that we hold a rather pessimistic view: there are simply too many distractions at play, whether the live-streaming format, gifting, or rankings; things beyond the relationship keep surfacing again and again, and what gets lost is the very emotion that should lie at the heart of any relationship. Intimacy is meant to arise naturally, without barriers, yet what we see online, between streamer and audience, is not quite that. Or at least, not only that anymore. The platform’s intervention has undeniably turned people into commodities and data points, and human connection is kept at a distance behind a barrier set up by platform algorithms.

As millennials, we have lived through the internet’s entire journey, from its emergence, through its growth, to what it has become today. Perhaps, as the last generation to remember life before the internet arrived, reflecting on these changes is a task we cannot avoid.