This paper describes where and how research into the Amazon-owned livestreaming platform Twitch can profitably engage surveillance studies. It argues that Twitch sits at the intersection of what David Lyon calls “surveillance culture,” a culture in which watching and being watched is fundamental to individuals’ customs, habits, and ways of interpreting the world; and surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff’s term for an emerging logic of accumulation built on data collection and hoarding. I draw attention to three different actors in the Twitch ecosystem—the viewer, the streamer, and the platform owner—to articulate the different modes of seeing and being seen each position affords. In all cases, I illustrate how visibility is bound up in a complex, multidirectional web of political economic relations. In order to resist technological determinist narratives about platform effects, I consider Twitch as a “boundary object” in order to identify how social, geographical, and cultural context influences actors in each position. I conclude by offering some observations about what Twitch reveals about platform surveillance in general.

中文翻译：

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看着我付款：抽搐和监视的文化经济

本文介绍了对亚马逊拥有的实时流媒体平台Twitch的研究在何处以及如何能够使监测研究从中获利。它认为Twitch位于David Lyon所谓的“监视文化”的交汇处，在这种文化中，观察和被监视对于个人的习俗，习惯和解释世界的方式至关重要。和监督资本主义，Shoshana Zuboff的术语是建立在数据收集和ho积基础上的一种新兴的积累逻辑。我提请注意Twitch生态系统中的三个不同参与者-观看者，主持人和平台所有者-阐明每个位置所提供的不同的观看和观看模式。在所有情况下，我都说明了可见性是如何在复杂的，多方向的政治经济关系网络中捆绑在一起的。为了抵制关于平台效应的技术决定性叙述，我将Twitch视为“边界对象”，以便确定社会，地理和文化背景如何影响每个位置的参与者。最后，我对Twitch在平台监视方面的发现提出了一些看法。