Super Stream Message
A research on the media complexity of VPRO’s psychological experiment Super Stream Me
Name: Josse van Meegeren Student number: 10627057
Supervisor: Dhr. Dr. J. W. Kooijman Second reader: Dhr. Dr. J. A. Teurlings University: University of Amsterdam Master: Television and Cross-Media Culture
Date of completion: 24/06/2016
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Abstract
In this thesis, VPRO’s privacy experiment Super Stream Me (2015) is discussed in terms of its media complexity. Super Stream Me consisted of two parts: a livestream via which the participants and also filmmakers Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul were monitored for sixteen days and a four-part documentary series that was based on the footage of the livestream. The programme makers presented Super Stream Me as a psychological experiment, but in this thesis I argue that the programme was also a media experiment with a clear-cut message that was being conveyed, namely that social media are dangerous and threaten our privacy. The analysis has divided Super Stream Me into three different parts: the livestream, the documentary series and its relation with the viewers. The double role of Tim and Nicolaas as participants as well as makers, next to the double role of the viewer as active participant and as invader of privacy, both display how Super Stream Me can be interpreted as a media experiment.
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Acknowledgements
It is hard to believe how quickly this past year has gone by. When I started the professional track of Television and Cross-Media Culture, my goal was to deepen my knowledge regarding Media Studies and broaden my perspective on possible professionals paths to take. I can honestly say that I have reached this goal: writing this thesis allowed me to challenge my academic skills, which I very much enjoyed, and my internship at NTR has helped me to concretise what I inspire to do after I graduate. However, this would not have been possible without the following people. First of all, I would like to thank my supervisor Jaap Kooijman for his great insights and feedback throughout this thesis process. He kept pushing me to take my research to the next level and I found his way of supervising very pleasant. I also want to acknowledge Linda Duits, who agreed to meet with me to talk about Super Stream Me. Her enthusiasm and inside information really helped me writing the last chapter of my thesis. And lastly, I am very grateful to have such a great support system of family and friends. Thanks to Ingmar in particular, who has been my biggest support over the last couple of months and who managed to lift my spirits every time I felt discouraged (especially on Sundays).
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION ...... 6
CHAPTER ONE: FROM BIG BROTHER TO SUPER STREAM ME ...... 9
Introduction ...... 9
Reality TV and the “Real” in Reality ...... 10
The Ordinary Celebrity Under Surveillance ...... 13
Multiplatform Event Television ...... 17
Conclusion ...... 19
CHAPTER TWO: THE LIVESTREAM AS REALITY TELEVISION ...... 20
Introduction ...... 20
One Big Status Update ...... 22
Surveillance...... 22
Multiplatform Format ...... 25
Highlights of Super Stream Me ...... 27
Highlight 1: Tim Poops for the First Time ...... 28
Highlight 2: Tim Does Something Very Stupid ...... 29
Highlight 3: Tim Meets a Fan ...... 31
Highlight 4: End of the Experiment ...... 32
Conclusion ...... 33
CHAPTER THREE: THE CONSTRUCTED NARRATIVE OF THE DOCUMENTARY SERIES ...... 35
Introduction ...... 35
Modes of Documentary ...... 36
Construction of a Narrative ...... 38
The Voice-Over ...... 39
Commentary by Experts ...... 41
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Twitter Feeds ...... 44
Conclusion ...... 46
CHAPTER FOUR: THE INVESTED VIEWER ...... 48
Introduction ...... 48
Two New Best Friends ...... 49
The “Free Labour” of the Viewers ...... 53
Conclusion ...... 57
CONCLUSION: DOUBLE ROLES ...... 59
Reference List ...... 62
Media List ...... 64
CHAPTER TWO ...... 64
CHAPTER THREE ...... 64
CHAPTER FOUR...... 65
Attachment One: Daily Reports ...... 66
Attachment Two: Highlights ...... 69
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INTRODUCTION
Being observed every moment of the day and having an audience of strangers watch your every move: in the summer of 2015 this was the reality for Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul. Tim and Nicolaas were the participants as well as the filmmakers of VPRO’s psychological privacy experiment Super Stream Me, which consisted of two parts: a livestream that viewers could watch for a duration of sixteen days on the official Super Stream Me website and a four-part documentary series that was broadcasted on Dutch public television channel NPO 3 two months after the livestream. In today’s social media environment, in which people tend to share a great deal of their private lives in public, the main question the makers of Super Stream Me wanted to ask, was: what is the importance of privacy nowadays? The title of Super Stream Me is a reference to the 2004 documentary Super Size Me by filmmaker Morgan Spurlock. This film displays the thirty-day experiment during which Spurlock solely ate fast food from McDonald’s. He wanted to investigate the mental, physical and emotional consequences of following a diet that only consisted of fast food. Super Stream Me encompasses a similar structure in which the filmmakers filmed every moment of their lives without any interruptions in order to create a better understanding of the significance of privacy nowadays and oversee the psychological consequences of being exposed to the public at all times. This set-up is in line with earlier work of Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul in which they fulfil the role of both filmmaker and participant. In, for example, Een man weet niet wat hij mist (VPRO, 2013), Tim and Nicolaas, who are both gay, explore the boundaries of their sexuality. The documentary film shows how Tim sleeps with a woman for the first time, making him a participant as well as filmmaker. This is also the case with Oudtopia (VPRO, 2014), a documentary series in which Tim and Nicolaas stayed and lived in a nursing home for one month amongst the elderly. The double role of participant next to filmmaker is neither new nor unusual for Tim and Nicolaas. However, with respect to Super Stream Me, another party was included for them to relate to, namely the viewers. The programme started with a livestream experiment, which the viewers could interact with and react to mostly via Twitter. This means the viewers fulfilled a certain active role as well. This is what makes Super Stream Me a relevant research object for Media Studies: the double role of
6 participant and maker next to the participatory position of the viewers contribute to the notion of Super Stream Me as a media experiment, instead of merely a psychological experiment as it was presented by the VPRO. Therefore the main objective of this research is to analyse Super Stream Me in terms of its media complexity. The analysis will divide Super Stream Me into three different parts: the livestream, the documentary and its relation with the viewer. In this thesis, I will argue that Super Stream Me was on the one hand a self-proclaimed psychological experiment, but on the other, a media experiment that was set up as a television production and contained a message that was already set and was foregrounded throughout the series, namely that social media are dangerous and threaten our privacy. The double role of Tim and Nicolaas as participant and maker, together with the double role of the viewer as active participant and invader of privacy, both contribute to Super Stream Me as a media experiment with a clear-cut and fixed message. I will demonstrate this argument in four different chapters. Important to note is that in this thesis all the English titles of the written reports (see attachment one), highlights (see attachment two), documentary episodes and blogs are my translation. This also accounts for headlines of newspaper articles, quotes from these articles and quotes from the written reports. Quotes from the voice-over and the experts in the documentary are my translation as well. Chapter one functions as a theoretical and historical overview in which the differences and similarities between reality television hit Big Brother and Super Stream Me will be discussed. This chapter covers the main themes and topics regarding reality TV. Big Brother marks the point of departure for this overview since it can be seen as the start of reality television as it still exists today. The goal is to address some of the issues around Super Stream Me that have a history in reality television. I will show how the boundaries of reality programming seem to have been pushed. Chapter two consists of the analysis of the highlights of the livestream that have been selected by the programme makers and are still available on the official website, as the livestream itself can no longer be accessed. In this chapter the livestream will be perceived as reality television in order to reveal more about Super Stream Me. Four different highlights of the livestream will be discussed in detail to create a better understanding of the experiment. I will argue that the livestream became a televisual event due to high media visibility and the multiplatform format of that livestream. This
7 chapter mainly focuses on Tim and Nicolaas as participants of Super Stream Me, next to their role as makers, for they participated in the livestream practices themselves. Chapter three addresses the documentary series of Super Stream Me, which followed the livestream and is featured as a look back on the experiment. The purpose of this chapter is to discuss the different modes of the documentary and how they form a constructed narrative by means of a voice-over, commentary by experts and the inclusion of Twitter feeds from viewers. I will argue that the four-part series contains a highly dystopian message, namely that social media are dangerous, which is foregrounded throughout the entire series. The analysis focuses on in what way Tim and Nicolaas also acted as makers, which is related to the participatory and performative mode of the documentary. Going in the field themselves made the documentary participatory of nature, and the subjective and personal dimensions of the experiment led to the performative elements of the series, namely that the makers were trying to assert a message. Chapter four discusses the role of the invested viewers of Super Stream Me in respect to the livestream on the one hand and the documentary series on the other. Their interaction amongst each other, with Tim and Nicolaas, and with the “invisible” producers of the programme will be discussed. In this chapter I will argue that the role of the invested viewers changed from a necessary contribution as active participants to a more negative role of “voyeurs” that formed one of the main reasons the livestream experiment ended early. These four chapters combined will discuss the media complexity of Super Stream Me. And by giving insight into Super Stream Me and interpreting it as a media experiment, this thesis will allow for thoughts about complex relations that are relevant within Media Studies. Present research will create a better understanding of the relation between new media and more “traditional” media, between television and social media, between television and documentary and between programme makers and viewers.
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CHAPTER ONE: FROM BIG BROTHER TO SUPER STREAM ME
Introduction Reality television hit Big Brother (Veronica, 1999 – 2006) and psychological experiment Super Stream Me (VPRO, 2015) are both television programmes, both can be considered as reality television and both form a social experiment, even though they were introduced sixteen years apart. However, they differ in their angle and approach for Big Brother was mainly focused on shocking and entertaining its audience, whereas Super Stream Me was brought to the public as a psychological experiment containing a social commentary. In John de Mol’s Big Brother, which was a hybrid of a “docusoap” and reality gameshow, a group of nine people lived in a house isolated from the outside world. They were under daily surveillance for over three months with 24 different cameras placed all through the house. Viewers could watch the daily activities of these ordinary people on television and online. In the summer of 2015, the livestream of Super Stream Me went online. The two participants who were also filmmakers – Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul – moved out of their homes and lived together in an apartment for the purpose of the experiment; they were under the same complete surveillance (although for a shorter period of time); and viewers could visit the Super Stream Me website and watch Tim and Nicolaas at every moment of the day. However, another important difference between the two programmes is that the Big Brother house was full of hidden cameras while Tim and Nicolaas carried around their own equipment. Therefore the camera became more visible in Super Stream Me in contrast to Big Brother and its Orwellian idea of “Big Brother is watching you”: one camera that is always in sight versus a lot of cameras that are never shown. Even before its first broadcast, Big Brother caused a public debate. Questions of exhibitionism, voyeurism and exploitation of the participants dominated the discussion. However, within a month the new reality programme became one of the top-rated shows, turning Big Brother into a cultural phenomenon (Van Zoonen 2001: 669). Whereas Big Brother was subjected to outrage and controversy, the more recent experiment Super Stream Me hardly received any criticism before its livestream went online. This lack of protest raises questions about today’s understanding of surveillance, privacy and exposing the private life in public and if that understanding has changed over the last decade. Sceptics predicted irreparable psychological damage to participants of Big Brother whilst with respect to Super Stream Me these mental
9 consequences were discussed but did not form a paramount reason not to perform the experiment. In fact, they formed the predominant motivation of the experiment. While the introduction of Big Brother was viewed as a low point in Dutch television, with respect to Super Stream Me these objections did not even exist, even though the surveillance was taken to a greater extent by also including heartrate measurements and GPS tracking. In order to understand this transition it is important to scrutinize the similarities and differences between the two programmes. This research will approach both programmes as reality television. In doing so it will help to compare the two programmes and it will be able to discuss some of the issues around Super Stream Me that have a history in reality TV. This first chapter will consist of three sections in which reality TV related themes will be discussed, which later will be used as tools for the analysis of Super Stream Me. The first step of this outline is to discuss reality television as a category or a genre in order to look at the ways Big Brother and Super Stream Me can be defined as reality TV. The next step is to analyse how ordinary people can become extraordinary or celebrities. The focus is not on how mundane people can become famous or “reality stars”, but on the ability of ordinary people to expose their private lives to the public and thereby giving away (a part of) their privacy. This second section will closely look at the individual who is put under surveillance and how this act of surveillance can be conducted. In the third and final section, both Big Brother and Super Stream Me will be perceived as more than just television programmes. It will be argued how both can be seen as a televisual or a media event due to the multiplatform formats and the audience’s engagement with the programmes. This chapter will therefore function as a historical, theoretical outline by discussing themes and topics regarding reality TV that were relevant in the late nineties/early zeros and are still relevant today with respect to Super Stream Me.
Reality TV and the “Real” in Reality Reality television has emerged as a category to describe a wide range of entertainment programmes located in border territories between information and entertainment, documentary and drama. It is often associated with non-professional actors, unscripted dialogues in pre-planned but non-fictional settings, capturing events as they unfold in front of the camera (Hill 2005: 41). It is not precisely clear when reality television made
10 its way into television schedules since there is such a broad variety of programmes that can be grouped under the genre or format of reality TV. Annette Hill describes three kinds of waves that can be traced to the history of reality programming. The first wave was based upon the success of crime and emergency services reality television in the late 1980s to early 1990s. The reality programmes brought the camera straight to the scene where the action took place. The second wave contains “docusoaps” and lifestyle programming involving house and garden makeovers and gained popularity during the mid- to late nineties. The third wave emerged in the early 2000s and incorporates the reality gameshows. These gameshows were based upon social experiments of placing ordinary people in governed environments over an extended period of time. In contrast to the first wave of reality programming, the camera no longer went were the action took place but let the action unravel in front of the camera, thus the camera functioning as a “fly on the wall” (Hill 2005: 24). In her book Reality TV (2015), June Deery seeks to provide an overview of where reality television stands today. Reality TV has become highly popular over the last decade, dominating television schedules all around the world, even though many will put the label of “trash television” on reality programming. She argues that to dismiss reality television as an object of study due to its often trivial content is to overlook its significance (Deery 2015: 2). Deery marks the international success of Big Brother and of similar reality gameshow programmes as the start of reality TV as it exists today. These programmes have several elements in common for example competition, complete surveillance, a short amount of time between editing and airing, cross-media links, and these reality formats are sold across the world (Deery 2015: 16). In this research the same starting point will be taken on. Therefore the overview begins with Big Brother instead of with the earlier reality programmes from the first and second wave. In analysing the status of reality TV, June Deery points out the real elements of reality TV next to the staged ones. She starts out with the claim that “reality TV is a non- fictional presentation of actual events occurring in the empirical world as experienced by amateur participants who have not been hired to act someone other than themselves or to recite a program-length script” (Deery 2015: 31). In other words, participants of reality programmes have real experiences instead of fictionalized ones. These experiences would not be the same if the participants were playing a fictional role. Viewers are attracted to this “realness” of reality programming, to the emotions of
11 participants and unexpected outcomes. Yet Deery significantly spends more attention on the staged elements of reality shows. She notes that the planned elements differ from format to format, but she outlines several common practices such as the casting, filming, editing and scripting of a reality programme. It indicates that reality television represents the “real”, but in a dramatized way. The real life gets amplified, projected and performed (Deery 2015: 31). Reality programmes all contain some form of staging or framing. In Staging the Real: Factual TV Programming in the Age of Big Brother (2003), Richard Kilborn tries to trace the development of the various categories of reality television. He uses the term “reality formatting” to describe staging as a type of operation (Kilborn 2003: 156). It is the act of setting up events and manipulating situations for television’s wants and needs, namely for the purpose of television entertainment. This style of programming is frequently labelled as “created-for-TV” for it emphasizes the interference of the televisual scenarios (Kilborn 2003: 156). In the case of the reality gameshow format the aim of the set-up is to create television entertainment based on interaction between and performances from participants with a clear-cut voyeuristic appeal relying to a great extent on television assistance (Kilborn 2003: 163). Big Brother for instance involved small-scale, everyday activities, focusing on the emotions and tensions between contestants that were then magnified since there was not much else to focus on (Hill 2005: 31). The programme revolved around the dramatization of the everyday life. Hill argues that this notion of dramatization is crucial and paradoxical at the same time. She states that “the more entertaining a factual programme is, the less real it appears to viewers” (Hill 2005: 57). This means in reality programming real stories are used in an entertaining manner. However, precisely because these real stories serve as entertainment, viewers are doubtful of the authenticity of various reality television programmes (Hill 2005: 58). Today’s reality programming not only encompasses real-life stories but makes use of “scripted reality” as well. This form of reality television demonstrates the observation of people in their own environment, but with use of pre-planned dialogue and staged plotlines (Deery 2015: 51). Examples of these “slightly” scripted series are The Hills (MTV, 2006 – 2010) and Made in Chelsea (E4, 2011 – present) where the cast is informed about topics to discuss with appointed cast members without handing them specific lines to say. Therefore scenes in these scripted reality series are more roughly planned out rather
12 than written line by line. This recent trend of reality programming involves the active shaping and framing of the programme by the production team of the show (Deery 2015: 52). The “real” or the “staged” do not only refer to the contestants or the events of a reality programme, but also to the setting. Big Brother was about the surveillance of the day-to-day life, which makes it rather contradictory that a natural setting had to be created in order to survey the everyday activities of the contestants. The house was designed to be familiar and convenient yet the presence of surveillance cameras undermined this recognizable, domestic setting (Kavka 2008: 83). In this way, Big Brother alludes to the “intimate strangers” genre; the surveillance of the participants makes them strange – viewers look at them as the “other” – and the cameras seek to capture their intimate, everyday relations. It is based on isolation where only the cameras provide access to the artificially enclosed environment, making the Big Brother habitat into a “human zoo” or laboratory (Kavka 2008: 83). Comparing this to Super Stream Me it seems its setting can also be found “strange” for the apartment was not the participants’ actual home. However, the aspect of group isolation did not form a key element of the experiment. This will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter.
The Ordinary Celebrity Under Surveillance The dramatization of the real can also be associated with the participants or the “real” people on a reality show. Both Big Brother as well as Super Stream Me incorporated ordinary people and the surveillance of their day-to-day activities into the content of their programmes. This forms, as discussed in the former section, one of the attractions of reality TV: participants of reality programmes do not play a fictional role, but are on television for being themselves. In reality shows ordinary people are voluntarily letting their lives be filmed. They are under partial or complete surveillance and are thereby giving up some or all of their privacy. Participants do not necessarily have to be talented or skilled in order to appear on a reality programme: in these cases the fact that the contestants are just being themselves creates some form of intimacy (Deery 2015: 55). Ordinary people appearing on television is hardly new. However, Joshua Gamson argues that nowadays “new television programming strategies and new web technologies, have pushed the ordinary to the forefront” (2011: 1064). He explains reality television is characterized by the concept of “ordinary celebrity” which is twofold: ordinary, unexceptional people can become famous or have their “fifteen-minutes-of-fame” and
13 celebrities can be made ordinary (Gamson 2011: 1062). The former was the case with Big Brother, whereas the latter applies to Super Stream Me for Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul were not “ordinary” but already known in the television industry. They had a clear mission with the experiment, so they were not only participants but also fulfilled the role of filmmakers in Super Stream Me. In Big Brother viewers were engaged in watching the contestants cooking, eating, sleeping, cleaning, arguing, or just feeling bored. The houseguests were not particularly talented, but watching the extreme ordinariness created an intimate relationship between contestant and viewer (Holmes 2004: 117). Annette Hill argues this intimate relationship is built upon the viewer’s search of “moments of truth” within a televised environment. Viewers tend to make a difference between the performed selves and the true selves of reality TV participants, judging the behaviour and degree of authenticity of ordinary people (Hill 2005: 68). The assessment of performance can often be based on the success of the contestant in the game, and also the level of staying “true” to oneself. However, with ordinary people it is hard to know whether one is performing his true self since the contestants are strangers to the viewers (Hill 2005: 69). This differs from celebrities who appear on reality programming with whom the viewer already got acquainted. Jonathan Bignell describes the relation between the viewer and the celebrity participant as one based on knowledge from outside the text of the reality programme. This outside information encourages audiences to believe they already know the personality they see. But instead of seeing the celebrity as an actor or presenter, the viewer will gain some insight into the real-life personality of someone who is already known from television (Bignell 2005: 93). In the case of Super Stream Me participants Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul were not completely “ordinary” since they already worked in the entertainment and documentary field before the experiment, as opposed to the contestants of Big Brother who were ordinary people who became famous by their television appearance. Viewers of the livestream were able to see how both Tim and Nicolaas acted in their daily lives outside of the film and television industry. The audience’s assessment of Tim and Nicolaas was then, according to Bignell’s argument, not solely based on the livestream of Super Stream Me, but also on their appearances on other television programmes or documentaries. In today’s social media environment technologies also generate web-based ordinary celebrity where people operate from their homes and fame is being achieved
14 on YouTube, Facebook or Instagram. These do-it-yourself celebrities can create a following and attain much more agency over their own content than is the case with reality television participants who have less control over production (Grindstaff 2014: 235). Gamson discusses the democratizing of fame since the audience’s power to achieve celebrity status instead of only being able to consume celebrity has significantly increased through the Internet. However, he argues that web-celebrity should not be overestimated for its value and reach still comes nowhere near the television appearance (Gamson 2011: 1067). Gamson’s article was written in 2011 and therefore his argument should be questioned and re-evaluated given the growing use and impact of social media technologies the last couple of years. It has changed the relation between social and “traditional” media, although the latter still remains important. In the analysis on one of the Super Stream Me highlights in the next chapter, this importance will be further discussed. Today’s society is increasingly under surveillance, either offline or online. Therefore reality television is appropriate for our society since surveillance can be considered as its basic mode of operation (Bignell 2005: 135). Bignell is one of several authors who argue that reality television has helped viewers to conform to intimate and extensive forms of surveillance in order to benefit governmental as well as commercial and economic interests (also Andrejevic 2004; Couldry 2004). He claims that due to reality television’s images of surveillance the audience gets accustomed to the fact that they are being seen and can potentially be broadcasted or put on the Internet (Bignell 2005: 136). Bignell continues his argument by stating surveillance leads to reflective self-monitoring and thus affects a person’s behaviour. This mainly applies to criminal activity since footage of suspicious behaviour often appears in a crime related television programme serving as supporting evidence (Bignell 2005: 136). The first wave of reality television (as described earlier, formulated by Annette Hill) consisted of crime reality television programmes such as Crimewatch UK (BBC1, 1984 – present), America’s Most Wanted (FOX, 1988 – 2012) and Cops (FOX, 1989 – present). It can be argued that these are the kind of programmes that made the public accustomed to images of surveillance and the idea of being watched. Crime reality television programmes are examples of reality programming where participants are not aware of the fact that they are being filmed and even if they do, it happens involuntarily. Other programmes where this is the point of departure, but is in
15 turn used for comical purposes are Candid Camera (ABC, 1948 – 2014), the Dutch version Bananasplit (AVROTROS, 1980 – 2004; 2009 – 2014) or more recent formats like MTV’s Punk’d (MTV, 2003 – 2012). In these formats ordinary people along with celebrities are deliberately put in strange situations or odd events are happening around them and their reaction is recorded without their knowledge. Viewers know the participants are unaware of the present cameras, which contributes to the humorous character of the programmes. However, generally in reality television both viewers and participants know the participants are being watched although this is hardly ever shown. Cameras and crewmembers are kept off screen, which means the act of surveillance is known but yet stays hidden (Deery 2015: 156). In gameshows participants voluntarily go under surveillance and the act of surveillance is undisguised even though not physically shown. Big Brother evolved around a nearly absolute surveillance as a thematised aspect of the programme; only the toilets were free of hidden cameras (Kavka 2008: 87). Besides Big Brother John de Mol co-created and produced similar formats in which complete surveillance was the key element such as De Gouden Kooi (Tien, 2006 – 2008). In this programme ten participants lived in an enclosed luxurious villa and the last one remaining would win the villa and over a million euros. The manner of eliminating contestants was highly controversial since houseguests were expected to tease and pick on one another until someone decided to leave. More comparable to Big Brother is De Mol’s recently developed social experiment Utopia (SBS6, 2013 – present) in which participants go “back to basics” only in an extremer matter than with Big Brother: their goal is to build an entire existence starting with only the foremost necessities of life. Noteworthy is how Utopia is presented as a “social experiment” instead of a reality gameshow. It indicates a different angle of the programme, as is the case with Super Stream Me. The long runs of these reality programmes regarding the surveillance of ordinary people and their daily activities in somewhat extraordinary circumstances show the attraction surveillance- based programming has. This is also enhanced by their multiplatform formats for viewers are able to watch the participants online as well, by way of a livestream (Holmes 2004: 117). The multiplatform format will be discussed in the next section as a final topic of this chapter. The hidden act of surveillance is no longer the general mode of reality television. Many reality programmes take on a self-conscious aesthetics where the cameras and the
16 crew are made visible on camera like Catfish: The TV Show (MTV, 2012 – present) and Teen Mom: Original Girls (MTV, 2015 – present) (Deery 2015: 73). Super Stream Me also does not hide the act of surveillance; in fact the act of surveillance is the entire experiment. Participants Tim and Nicolaas are filming themselves since there is no camera crew to follow them around. The cameras are shown, viewers can no longer ignore the mediation of real life since it appears right in the image of their screen. It displays a transition or development in reality TV when comparing Big Brother and Super Stream Me: with the former the act of surveillance stayed latent and with the latter the act of surveillance is foregrounded. Also the absoluteness of surveillance differs in both programmes. While Big Brother drew the line with the toilet, in Super Stream Me everything is streamed including the toilet visits, which can be considered as the last existing “taboo” on television that now has been broken. Taking these differences into account, it seems the boundaries of reality television have been pushed over the last years.
Multiplatform Event Television One of the key elements in Big Brother’s international achievements was the way the programme was heavily discussed by press. It gained significant media coverage, which supported the public talk and gossip about the contestants, the controversy and the outcome of the competition (Bignell 2005: 53). This notion of “event TV” will be discussed below and it will be argued that Super Stream Me, just like Big Brother, can be viewed as a media event. The media landscape has changed drastically with the introduction of technological developments. Jane Roscoe has argued that reality programming seemed to go hand in hand with this changing environment for it has taken on the multiplatform format. This format allows for viewers to interact and participate with the programme (Roscoe 2004: 368). Misha Kavka affirms this by claiming reality TV is bound to and defined by the age of convergence, but extends Roscoe’s argument by not only looking at the platform but also at the industry and economy level. She argues that Big Brother can be considered as a milestone moment in the platform convergence of television with its additional Internet and telephone services. She explains how Big Brother introduced audience voting and the running of live video and audio footage from the Big Brother house through an official website, at first for free and later at a small membership cost (Kavka 2011: 78). Also, by distributing 24 hour live feeds from the Big Brother
17 compound the programme pushed the definition of reality TV beyond the former reality formats according to Marc Andrejevic. Whereas previous similar programmes such as The Real World (MTV, 1992 – present) and Road Rules (MTV, 1995 – 2007) were also unscripted, undirected and unacted, the live footage made Big Brother also unedited, at least online. This was a promise that none of the other reality programmes were able to make so far (Andrejevic 2004: 121). The intertextuality and intertwining of broadcast and Internet use in reality programming makes the multiplatform format attractive for reality television since it maximises viewers’ engagement. It makes the audience both extended and dislocated: viewers are not confined to the television programme only nor do they have to be present at a specific time and location (Tincknell and Raghuram 2004: 260). This means the audience is able to tune in any time they like in order to read more about the contestants, watch the latest updates or chat with fellow fans in discussion rooms or on fan forums. Therefore multiplatform programming socialises viewers by creating a certain kind of community. This community establishes a sense of intimacy amongst viewers and between viewers and participants (Kavka 2008: 19). Big Brother marked the beginning of this kind of programming and it was also the case with Super Stream Me. Throughout the sixteen-day experiment viewers were encouraged to react and interact on Twitter using the hashtag #ssm15. The audience could talk collectively about the livestream or even have an influence on it. Not by means of voting as with Big Brother, but by means of “talking” to Tim and Nicolaas for the audience could tweet (with) the participants. The viewers formed a Super Stream Me community. Chapter four will regard the relation between the participants and the viewers of Super Stream Me in greater detail. However, when a programme rests on more than just broadcast and provides interactive services, it becomes more difficult to distinguish the “original” platform or the “central” text. In the case of Big Brother it meant its status changed from a television programme to a television event (Tincknell and Raghuram 2004: 261). Event TV can be defined as a form of television “aiming at a critical mass of viewers through high visibility and multi-media choice” (Biressi and Nunn 2005: 11). Big Brother was supported by and could be accessed through numerous media: television, Internet, mobile devices, books, tabloids, radio. Event TV therefore aims at attracting a vast amount of people and becoming a part of the popular discourse in a way the content and
18 action of the programme prompts conversation amongst viewers (Biressi and Nunn 2005: 11). This is best displayed in the Super Stream Me “pooping moment”, when Tim had to go to the toilet for the first time in the livestream. The hashtag #ssm15 became trending topic on Twitter and this moment was widely discussed in popular media. Super Stream Me therefore moved across several platforms and became part of the popular discourse, turning it into an event rather than a programme. This will be elaborated further in the coming analysis when Super Stream Me is not analysed as a psychological experiment, but considered as a media experiment.
Conclusion This chapter has discussed some of the main themes and topics of reality TV in order to compare programmes Big Brother and Super Stream Me and therefore explaining some of the issues around Super Stream Me. Big Brother marked the point of departure for this overview since the programme can be seen as the start of reality television as we know it today by introducing the multiplatform format with its interactive services, by subjecting ordinary participants to complete surveillance, and by creating intimacy amongst viewers and between viewers and participants. Reality TV has pushed the boundaries in terms of the content of the programmes causing commotion and public debate. But as stated in the introduction, Super Stream Me hardly suffered any criticism and the purpose of this chapter was to create a greater understanding of this notion. It could be argued that because reality television grew in a time of transparency, where people reveal more of their private lives in public, but also in a time of surveillance and monitoring either offline or online, the audience has grown with reality TV. Therefore it is possible people are able to tolerate more when it comes to reality programming since they are more acquainted with and conscious of reality practices. This will be used throughout the analysis for it could help in defining what Super Stream Me as reality programming, as a media experiment or as an intimate relationship actually is.
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CHAPTER TWO: THE LIVESTREAM AS REALITY TELEVISION
Introduction “What happens to Tim and Nicolaas and their environment if you ‘share’ everything from your entire life and you no longer control who knows ‘what’ about you and everything you do is available to the public?” (VPRO website). This quote comes from the official Super Stream Me website and represents the main question Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul asked themselves during the experiment, as participants as well as programme makers. Their goal was to learn about the importance of privacy nowadays. What is the value or significance of keeping personal information to oneself, particularly in today’s social media environment where sharing the private life in public happens on a wide scale? In order to create a greater understanding of its importance, the two men decided to relinquish their own privacy completely by means of livestreaming their entire lives. Viewers were able to visit the Super Stream Me website every hour of the day and watch Tim and Nicolaas eating, working, sleeping and living their lives in Amsterdam. The experiment was supposed to last for eighteen days, but ended early on the sixteenth day due to high levels of stress caused by of the total lack of privacy. In this chapter the livestream of Super Stream Me will be perceived as a reality television programme. The stream will be discussed in terms of how ideas of surveillance are used and in what way the livestream relates to other media and platforms. It is important to note that the original livestream is no longer available to analyse, and thus the footage cannot be accessed by viewers any more. Instead, the official website of Super Stream Me now contains 22 different highlights of the stream, which are the most interesting or noticeable moments selected by the programme makers and by the VPRO from the entire content. Next to these highlights, the website also provides written daily reports of the livestream. Each report summarizes the main events of the described day. The highlights along with the written daily reports will function as tools to discuss the livestream. Attachment one and two provide overviews of all the existing reports and highlights including the title, date and (if applicable) a short introduction. By analysing the highlights and reports this chapter will not reconstruct the livestream as it occurred, but will examine in what way the livestream is presented on the website and what that says about surveillance and its relation to other media platforms. In this sense the object of study will not be the stream, but the representation of the stream, which will be analysed in two separate sections.
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The first section of the analysis will focus on the livestream as a whole. Super Stream Me consisted of not one but two separate livestreams: one of Tim and one of Nicolaas. They both carried around their own camera that could be attached and detached on a backpack. On VPRO’s Super Stream Me website, both streams were placed next to each other in two different frames. Viewers were able to mute one of the streams in order watch and listen to the other one or mute both of them in order to only look at the images. In this research the two livestreams will be considered as one, because the highlights of the livestream and the written daily reports also do not take the separate streams in consideration but approach them as a whole. Since the participants were monitored every moment of the day no matter where they went, it is important to examine the livestream with respect to ideas of surveillance. This will regard the aesthetic of the livestream, but also the self-reflective behaviour and agency of the participants. Furthermore, the livestream will be viewed in relation to other platforms and the social and “traditional” media that it engaged with. After providing a general overview of these matters, it will be possible to do close readings of several highlights of the livestream. In this second part of the analysis, four different highlights have been selected to be discussed in detail in terms of their media complexity. They will exemplify the way Super Stream Me was not just a psychological experiment, but also a media experiment, which is the main argument of this thesis. Each of the four chosen highlights can tell us more about Super Stream Me as a reality programme. The highlights refer to the topics that have been discussed in the previous chapter on reality television. These topics are event television, the multiplatform format, notions of staging or framing and audience participation. The goal of the four close readings is to examine how each of these notions work in the highlight and what it can tell about Super Stream Me as an event, as a multiplatform programme, as a “scripted reality” show and as an interactive and participative programme. This leads to the main objective of this chapter: the question to be asked is not whether or not Super Stream Me can be regarded as television, but what can be revealed about Super Stream Me when perceived as reality television. This chapter will provide a textual analysis of the Super Stream Me livestream in order to comprehend the experiment as reality television programming.
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One Big Status Update Super Stream Me is referred to as “the most ground-breaking privacy experiment” by the VPRO (VPRO website). The experiment was inspired by Dave Eggers’ 2013 novel The Circle: the novel’s main character lives in a dystopian world in which privacy is considered as theft and she therefore decides to go “transparent” by streaming her entire life. Tim and Nicolaas took this by making their own lives “transparent”: “one big status update” as Nicolaas describes it in his column for Het Parool a week before the experiment started (Veul, 21-08-2015).
Surveillance The total transparency, the complete relinquishment of privacy and the absolute surveillance seem to be the main attraction of the experiment; the notion that their every move will be visible to the public, even the more intimate or shameful moments that one normally keeps to oneself. This extreme monitoring explains how the act of surveillance is also foregrounded in various ways in the livestream of Super Stream Me. The camera and other forms of equipment such as tripods are frequently visible in the image of the stream. This means the presence of the camera does not stay hidden, but is emphasized. As argued before, the self-conscious aesthetic is not new to television. Cameras and cameramen may appear on screen when following around participants (Deery 2015: 73). However, in Super Stream Me this self-consciousness works in a different way since there is no crew to film the participants, but the participants are recording themselves. Therefore the participants stand in a closer relation to the camera, also as filmmakers, since they have to carry around and operate the camera without help from others. In the written report of the first day (26 August 2015) it states that Tim had a hard time getting used to the technical aspect of the livestream: “He was constantly aware that he had to create the right shots for the viewers at home” (VPRO). This means Tim was less occupied with what he was doing, but more with how it looked on screen: an aspect participants of reality shows normally do not have to think of. Attachment one shows how the titles of the reports can be fairly straightforward with respect of the content of the main events that day. For example “Hairdresser, dentist, expert and pooping!”, “An interview with Bits of Freedom” and “Tim and Nicolaas meet super fan Matijn” give away most of what the report will be about. The same accounts for the written report of the first day: “We are live!”. This title immediately says something
22 about the presence of cameras and the act of surveillance that is being heightened. Also, the multiplatform format is being mentioned in its introduction by explaining how “reactions of viewers are starting to come in” (see attachment one, “Day 1: We are live!”) referring to Twitter and other social media platforms. The intertwining with different media platforms will be discussed later on in this section of the analysis. A different manner the surveillance was foregrounded was in terms of behaviour. In the same report it is mentioned how Nicolaas “constantly had the idea he had to perform or present himself” (VPRO). This notion of performing meant Nicolaas talked directly into the camera to his viewers, telling them what he was doing even though they could see it for themselves. These narrations function as updates and it seems the camera encourages to share emotions and thoughts. Ana María Munar explains this as digital exhibitionism or web exhibitionism. She argues technological platforms that provide tools to broadcast or publish daily life experiences enhance exhibitionist tendencies (Munar 2010: 409). The sharing of emotions and thoughts in daily life experiences becomes clear in the titles of the written reports as well: “A confrontation between Tim and Nicolaas”, “Nicolaas is feeling sad”, “An emotional day”; these are the titles of respectively the third, sixth and seventh day of the experiment. They revolve around the feelings and state of mind of the participants, which Tim and Nicolaas are constantly sharing with their viewers. In her article, Munar mainly focuses on social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter where users are invited to share personal information in the form of textual microblogging, but she also examines the use of videoblogging. She explains how users are able to turn their lives into their own version of Big Brother, creating a personal reality TV programme (Munar 2010: 411). The livestream of Super Stream Me was previously referred to as “one big status update” and in this way Super Stream Me can be considered as an extreme form of web exhibitionism since it restrains from any kind of interruption due to the constant presence of the camera. The sharing of experiences and emotions is continuous. The written daily reports can then be viewed as the narrations of the livestream, in which the experiences of Tim and Nicolaas are being shared and updated. The participants turned their lives into reality shows comparable to the Big Brother series. This is underlined by an article in De Volkskrant: “It could have been one of John de Mol’s ideas” (Geelen, 26-08-2015). In other words, the livestream of Super Stream Me can be seen as the personal reality programme of Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul.
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Although the participants of Super Stream Me were under complete surveillance in an artificial setting, it could be argued that the experiment is not entirely comparable to a laboratory or a “human zoo”, which was the case with Big Brother. As stated before, the fact that the participants of Super Stream Me did not live in their natural environment, makes the setting of the livestream staged and “strange” (Kavka 2008: 83). So on the one hand, this forms one of the reasons Super Stream Me can be seen as a “laboratory”: Tim and Nicolaas lived together in an apartment in Amsterdam solely for the duration of the experiment, which was not their own apartment. It functioned as the “laboratory” of the experiment where their every move would be visible. However, on the other, this setting was not enclosed and the participants were able to leave the environment or welcome others into their Super Stream Me habitat. Therefore the setting was not characterized by isolation, which is one of the essential traits of the “human zoo”. Next to the ability to leave the apartment, the participants retained another form of agency or control. Tim den Besten en Nicolaas Veul both carried around a camera, which formed the only access into the lives of the two filmmakers. The emphasis was on those two cameras, even though it might be possible the apartment contained more cameras. Some of the images and shots of the documentary series suggest the presence of other cameras that provided overview shots, but the focus lies with the mobile cameras of the participants. And since Tim and Nicolaas had to operate the camera themselves, they also had the ability to turn the camera away to show their viewers what they were seeing. Images of Tim and Nicolaas were therefore alternated with point of view shots, which gave them a sense of agency regarding the content. However, the two men were not allowed to put the camera away or turn the equipment off. The agreement was that the surveillance would be continuous for the duration of the experiment, although Tim breaks this rule on two different occasions during the experiment: on the fifth night, Tim stays at a hotel in Rotterdam with Winfried Baijens (currently the news presenter of NOS Journaal) and when he is installing the equipment, the image turns black which contrasts with the rule of full disclosure. It evoked discussion whether Tim did this on purpose or it was a technical error, which was Tim’s explanation. And also, near the end of the livestream, Tim breaks with the agreement by leaving the apartment without taking the camera with him (see attachment one, “Day 15: End of the experiment”). Turning the equipment off or walking away from the camera was not tolerated but still possible. The surveillance in Super
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Stream Me thus rested more on mutual understanding between the producers of the experiment and the participants, than on the power or control of the production. Moreover, Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul fulfilled a double role as both programme makers and participants. So the relation between the production team and Tim and Nicolaas as programme makers is of a more equal nature, but they form the only visible makers next to the “invisible” producers of Super Stream Me. The role of Tim and Nicolaas as filmmakers and the role of the production team will be further discussed in chapter four.
Multiplatform Format Viewers were only able to watch the livestream on the official Super Stream Me website. Nevertheless, this does not mean the livestream existed solely on one platform. Super Stream Me stood in relation with other media and platforms as well. The most obvious indicator is the banner that existed within the frame of the livestream at the bottom of the image. This banner showed real-time Twitter feeds from viewers who used the hashtag #ssm15 commenting on the livestream, the experiment and the participants. Tim and Nicolaas would often read these tweets out loud and answer questions of viewers, which gave a sense of interactivity to the livestream. In addition to the incorporation of other platforms within the livestream, the experiment was also covered by different “traditional” media. On the first day of the experiment a press conference was organized in the VPRO building with respect to the launch of the livestream. In the written report on this day it says: “After the presentation at the VPRO Tim and Nicolaas receive a lot of attention by the press: interviews, photoshoots, conversations with television critics, everybody is curious how the boys are feeling now that everything they do can be viewed live on the Internet” (VPRO). The intertwining of different platforms – the livestream and Twitter – and the attention of numerous media indicate that Super Stream Me was treated as a televisual event rather than a psychological experiment as it was presented. Through high media visibility and the encouragement to use the #ssm15 hashtag the aim of Super Stream Me was to enter popular discourse. The media created a hype around Super Stream Me with respect to the livestream, the complete surveillance and the monitoring of two people’s lives: therefore the livestream was not merely an experiment, it was an event. This will be discussed in detail when analysing the first highlight “Tim poops for the first time”.
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Media visibility did not only relate to coverage of the experiment, but included television appearances of Tim and Nicolaas as well. For instance, they were guests of talk shows RTL Late Night (RTL, 4 September 2015) and Zapplive (KRO-NCRV, 5 September 2015), respectively day ten and day eleven of the livestream. These appearances exemplify the interrelations between television and new media. On the Super Stream Me livestream viewers could watch the participants being filmed by their own cameras as well as by the cameras of the television studio. And on television the cameras Tim and Nicolaas carried around were clearly visible and the livestream was shown on a screen in the back of the studio. This creates a notion of hypermediacy, a term formulated by Bolter and Grusin in 1999, which means the medium is emphasized and mediation is made visible as opposed to immediacy where the viewer is being distracted of the presence of a medium (Lister et al. 2009: 29). By incorporating the livestream within both RTL Late Night and Zapplive through showing the livestreaming equipment and placing the livestream on a different screen in the background, multiple acts of representation are being acknowledged. Furthermore, it puts emphasis on the engagement of Super Stream Me with other platforms. Highlighting all the different screens, cameras and representations shows how the different media are connected and emphasize each other. It forms a double logic in which viewers can watch Tim and Nicolaas on the Internet, on television, and the same images viewers are able to watch on the Internet can also be seen on television. This way of representation is then pushing for hypermedia. However, the engagement of the livestream with different platforms is most noticeable when the stream itself was broadcasted on television. On 5 September 2015, the night between day eleven and day twelve of the experiment, viewers were able to watch the livestream on the public network channel NPO 3 alongside the Super Stream Me website. Again, this indicates the aim of marketing Super Stream Me as an event instead of a programme by combining television and new media in order to attract a vast audience and increase visibility. The broadcasting of the stream on television only occurred once. Super Stream Me would have been a completely different programme if the livestream had been broadcasted every night, for the reason the airing would not have been as exceptional. By only airing it once, also on the night the participants went to music festival Valtifest and not a night they went to bed early, the television broadcast became something “special”: a happening, an event. But more importantly, the airing of
26 the livestream on television prompts questions about the relation between television and new media: could the livestream be regarded as television even if it only existed on the Internet or does it need television broadcasting to be considered that way? The broadcasting of Super Stream Me on NPO 3 illustrates the media complexity that the experiment discloses. This will be further scrutinized in the close reading on the highlight “Tim does something very stupid” in the coming section of this chapter.
Highlights of Super Stream Me The website of Super Stream Me contains 22 different highlights that were selected by the programme makers from the entire footage of the livestream. These highlights form the remarkable or noteworthy events from the experiment and vary from private moments of the participants such as an argument or a moment of sadness to public events such as the television appearances and their visit to music festival Valtifest. Attachment two displays the 22 different highlights and as with the written reports, the titles are fairly straightforward. Regarding Super Stream Me as a reality programme, the titles show the focus on the emotional state of Tim and Nicolaas: “Nicolaas is getting in over his head”, “How do Tim and Nicolaas feel about the experiment now?”, “Tim is done”. Emotion and interpersonal conflict are central to the programme: just as with Big Brother, the highlights of Super Stream Me revolve around small-scale, everyday activities which are magnified and dramatized, emblematic for the reality gameshow (Hill 2005: 31). What is important to note is that in contrast to the uninterrupted livestream, the highlights are edited clips of the content. This means the two separate streams of the participants are put together and the footage of both cameras is edited into one stream. Also, due to the editing a highlight can encompass several places over different times in order to tell a small story, although this is not the case in every highlight clip. Whereas the livestream was not subjected to any form of interference, the highlights are indeed “staged”; not in terms of content but in terms of editing. The highlights thus function as small narrations in the form of videoblogging and altogether the clips tell the story of sixteen days of streaming: that is, the story the programme makers and the VPRO want to tell. Every highlight starts with a short leader of ten seconds and ends with an eleven seconds outro. For this analysis I have selected four different highlights to be subjected to a close reading. In the context of approaching Super Stream Me as reality television,
27 these four clips all encompass some of the themes and topics discussed in the previous chapter. By analysing these four highlights, I will be able to show how Super Stream Me was also event TV and existed in a multiplatform format. The analysis also clarifies how questions of staging and framing remained around the livestream and how audience participation was what made the experiment a success. By looking at specific moments in detail, it will be possible to say something about Super Stream Me as a whole.
Highlight 1: Tim Poops for the First Time It is 26 August 2015, the first day of the experiment. The title of the clip gives away what the viewer is about to witness: the first toilet visit of Tim den Besten since the beginning of the livestream. The clip has a duration of 3.05 minutes and starts out with Tim asking Nicolaas directions to the bathroom. They are in the VPRO building for the Super Stream Me press conference. This means everyone present is focused on the stream and has something to say about it, which makes the moment a highly loaded topic. The image shows the camera footage of Tim for only he is in the image and Nicolaas’ voice is heard off screen. When Nicolaas understands what Tim is about to do he suggests to come along for “backup” or for “good shots”, which underlines the close relation the participants have with the camera, operating it themselves as filmmakers, as discussed earlier. 27 seconds into the clip the image cuts to Tim being on the toilet. He has detached his camera from his backpack and placed it in front of him: the image is no longer shaky as a handheld camera but is now stable. For the next two and a half minutes the viewer can observe Tim den Besten “doing his business” from beginning to end. He narrates his every move: “Okay, toilet paper in the bowl to mask splashing sounds”, “I’m just going to make noise” and he starts singing and shouting, and “The worst is over, I’m glad I did it” when the actual pooping is finished. The enclosed environment of the toilet booth and the narrations give the suggestion of a confession booth generic to reality television, which is also emphasized by the now stable image. The confessional monologue can be considered as one of reality television’s main features and the key attraction of the confession is the revelation of “true” emotions: a moment of self-disclosure (Aslama and Pantti 2006: 168). The subjective, emotional power of the televised confession lies often within painful experiences since they can lead to intimacy and authenticity (Aslama and Pantti 2006: 178). The programme makers made a deliberate choice by showing the “pooping moment” in its totality, even though the viewer would also understand Tim’s embarrassment if the clip showed only
28 a part of the action. In other words, showing the entire moment made the experience more uncomfortable and at the same time more interesting to watch since it revealed Tim’s “true” emotions and a true moment of self-disclosure. Next to the content, the reception of this highlight is what makes it an important sequence to discuss. “Tim poops for the first time” went viral on the first day of Super Stream Me. It made the hashtag #ssm15 trending topic on Twitter. Tim’s toilet visit was uploaded on YouTube, shared on social media and covered by the press. It seemed this highlight formed the main topic of popular conversation at that time. In the US this is referred to as “water cooler TV” for it becomes part of the daily popular discourse. The highlight illustrates how the action in the livestream gets contextualized and intensified by excessive media visibility (Biressi and Nunn 2005: 11). Press took this experience and made it exemplary for the livestream as a project. The “pooping moment” was referred to as a “revolutionary moment of television” (Smits, 28-08-2015). The following titles are headlines of online newspaper articles regarding Super Stream Me: “Watching how Tim den Besten poops” (Het Parool, 28-08-2015), “Super Stream Me: showering and pooping in front of the camera” (AD, 27-08-2015), “Relaxing, pooping, sleeping. What happens when your life can be followed 24/7” (NRC, 27-08-2015). Each of these titles include the word “poop”. The whole experiment was suddenly explained by and reduced to this “pooping moment”. On the one hand, the pooping sensationalizes the livestream and on the other the toilet visit shows how intimate the livestream actually is. It is what the experiment promised to do: making the private public, showing what an outsider normally would not get to see. The “pooping moment” relates to the authenticity, the shame and the sensation Super Stream Me was expected to display. The action of Tim on the toilet was therefore intensified by excessive media visibility and this media coverage created Super Stream Me into an event.
Highlight 2: Tim Does Something Very Stupid The second highlight that will be discussed displays the way the livestream existed on more than one platform and underlines the relation between television and new media. The highlight helps to explain Super Stream Me as a multiplatform programme. The events of the highlight occurred during the broadcasting of the livestream on public network television on 5 September 2015. On the night between the tenth and the eleventh day of streaming the livestream was aired on NPO 3 from 11.50 pm till 06.20 am. This was also the night the participants of Super Stream Me went to the music
29 festival Valtifest in Amsterdam. In this 3.31 minutes clip called “Tim does something very stupid”, Tim den Besten reveals his telephone number to the viewers of the stream that is now also available on television alongside the official website. The fact that Tim said his number on television makes this incident different, than if it would have been if it happened solely on the livestream.
Figure 1
Figure 11 shows the audience ratings of the first two hours of the Super Stream Me broadcasting on 5 September 2015. The far right column is the number of viewers times a thousand. It demonstrates 27.000 viewers watched Tim revealing his number on television. This is a significant higher amount of viewers than the livestream would normally attract, which fluctuated between 400 and 600 viewers. The significant higher amount gave the revealing of the number more impact. In the highlight, Nicolaas speaks directly to the viewers: “You all have to call and then we will answer all your questions!”. It is a call for viewer interactivity that reminds of call TV or phone-in quiz shows where viewers were encouraged to call a telephone number in order to appear on the programme. Furthermore, it differs from the activity that already existed through the use of the hashtag #ssm15. By calling the telephone number the viewer is able to converse directly with the Super Stream Me participants as opposed to the online communication on Twitter. Jane Roscoe explains how multiplatform media events allow for audience participation and interactivity across various platforms such as television, the Internet and mobile phones (2004: 363). Viewers can become producers next to consumers of a reality programme by critically engaging with it through the multiplatform format (Roscoe 2004: 366). And by conversing with the participants, the viewer is able to engage with the content of the stream. On the night of 5 September 2015 the multiplatform format of Super Stream Me is heightened for viewers had several options to engage with the programme: they could watch the stream online, watch the stream on television, tweet about the stream, and now also call with the participants of the stream.
1 Data obtained via the intranet of NTR
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The highlight continues to show several conversations Tim has with strangers who are calling him. These conversations take place at Valtifest and later at a club and when Tim is wandering through the streets of Amsterdam. It indicates the incoming calls have been continuous and thus the number of viewers is significantly higher. Super Stream Me is now not only a stream that viewers can watch and react to on Twitter, but also a programme they can interact with and even have an influence on by calling one of the participants, as was the case with call TV. It emphasizes the relation between new and more traditional media. The highlight clip ends with Tim’s realization: “It was so stupid to tell my number”. The reason it was “stupid” was because it happened on television, because Super Stream Me was now available on multiple platforms and because of the interrelation between television and new media. Without the television broadcast, his actions would not have had such an impact, which relates to Gamson’s argument as discussed in the previous chapter (2011: 1067). However, in the highlight Tim and also Nicolaas are clearly under the influence of drugs and alcohol (Nicolaas is even smoking a joint at that moment). This plays a role in Tim’s “stupid” behaviour and should therefore be mentioned in analysing the highlight.
Highlight 3: Tim Meets a Fan The livestream of Super Stream Me was unedited and uninterrupted, but questions of staging or framing still remained. In the highlight of day six, “Tim meets a fan”, Tim den Besten encounters with Super Stream Me fan Iljan. The clip is relatively short with a length of 1.27 minutes and contains three small fragments of the conversation Tim and Iljan have together. Tim introduces the fan by saying: “I’m here with Iljan, @iljan on Twitter, and Iljan is a fan of Super Stream Me.” In this first shot Tim talks directly into the camera and addresses his viewers in a way that is common to a traditional talk show. Moreover, the connection between the participant and the fan is immediately stated within this introduction, which is Twitter. Iljan tweeted about Super Stream Me, reacted to the livestream and is now “invited” to appear on the stream or on the show. Together they discuss the authenticity or “realness” of Super Stream Me, as if Super Stream Me were to be a talk show. This clip illustrates how the staging could work twofold in the livestream: fan Iljan believes the stream is not entirely real, but subjected to interference by the producers. Producers would inform the participants what to do or say in a specific situation. On the other hand, Tim suspects Iljan to be staged as well in the sense that
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Iljan has been sent by the production team with a hidden agenda. This suspiciousness can be connected to earlier events that happened on day four of the experiment. The programme makers of Super Stream Me had published screenshots of some of Tim’s private Whatsapp conversations online without his consent (see attachment one, “Day 4: Everything to get likes or streaming shamelessly?”). It made him paranoid and distrustful towards the production team. Both examples of staging refer to the “scripted reality” format of reality programming, where situations and actions are framed and shaped by production and scenes are planned out beforehand (Deery 2015: 51). By discussing this highlight it shows that the “real” in reality invariably remains questionable. However, the highlight clip ends before either the Super Stream Me participant or the fan is able to clarify his view on the extent of scripting in the livestream. And the description of the highlight on the website also fails to provide a conclusive answer (see attachment two, “Day 6: Tim meets a fan”). The question then remains for which reasons the VPRO decided to turn this footage into a Super Stream Me highlight for it clearly disputes the authenticity of the programme. Possibly it could relate to the gratification viewers attain when searching for “moments of truth” within a reality programme as explained in the previous chapter. It forms an ongoing discussion that shifts between trust and suspicion of the behaviour of the participants of the programme (Hill 2005: 68). By selecting this highlight the programme makers invite the viewer to critically look at the livestream and contemplate on the “truthfulness” of the stream.
Highlight 4: End of the Experiment Tim and Nicolaas were supposed to film their lives for eighteen days, but they never reached their goal. On 10 September 2015 Super Stream Me came to an end and the final images of the stream are edited into a highlight clip of 3.16 minutes. Footage of the cameras of both the participants is used so the highlight draws attention to the presence of more than one camera in the room. In the clip Nicolaas suggests to quit the livestream after Tim has had a nervous breakdown (see attachment two, “Day 15: Tim is done”). A noteworthy comment by Nicolaas is: “It is already on Nu.nl”. “VPRO’s privacy project Super Stream Me ends earlier than expected” was the title of the article (Nu.nl). Nu.nl is an online news platform and the fact that the end of Super Stream Me was already announced before the cameras were actually turned off underlines the high media visibility of the livestream. In other words, the press was on top of the experiment.
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During the final moments of the livestream Nicolaas turns to the viewers to say the experiment would not have existed without them. He addresses them as voyeurs, and yet acknowledges the viewers for their compassion and involvement: “I hope you all felt like perverts at times, (…) but you also really sympathized with us, which was certainly special and weird at the same time.” This alludes to the binary relationship that characterized the interaction between the participants and the viewers of the livestream. On the one hand, Tim and Nicolaas broke down due to the constant presence of viewers watching their every move, but on the other, they needed these viewers for the Super Stream Me experiment to succeed. This means audience participation was crucial for the experiment. And the way the experiment was formatted, maximised viewer’s engagement. Twitter and the hashtag #ssm15 created a sense of community amongst its users. The notions of the invested viewer and online audience involvement were thus essential aspects of Super Stream Me. Or as Nicolaas phrases it: “Without you the experiment would not have existed”, “you” referring to the community. The relationship between participant and viewer and the idea of an online community will be further analysed in chapter four.
Conclusion This chapter has discussed the livestream of Super Stream Me in terms of a reality programme. By means of examining the available highlights of the footage and reading the written daily reports the objective was to understand how ideas of surveillance were incorporated, how the livestream existed on more than one platform and how it can be considered as a televisual media event. The reality TV related themes and topics that were discussed in the first chapter were now used as tools to analyse how Super Stream Me relates to these subjects. In Super Stream Me the surveillance of the ordinary lives of the participants is foregrounded. This is illustrated by the absoluteness of the surveillance since the cameras were taken everywhere and no location was excluded, but also by the self-conscious aesthetic of the livestream. Cameras and equipment are frequently shown in the image of the livestream, emphasizing the mediation of the everyday life. Controlling and operating the equipment themselves meant the participants held a sense of control to a certain extent. However, this form of agency is relative since they could not manage what happened with the images once they were online. This is depicted in the “pooping moment” of Tim: the video went viral, was
33 shared on social media, was covered by the press and made Super Stream Me part of popular discourse. Therefore it could be argued the livestream was more than an uninterrupted stream of video images and can be regarded as an event due to high media visibility. This is underlined by the aim at reaching a vast amount of viewers by means of broadcasting the livestream on public network television. The broadcasting of the livestream also increased audience participation when one of the participants revealed his telephone number and viewers started calling and conversing with the two participants. In conclusion, by discussing the livestream as a reality programme it illustrates how Super Stream Me was about the surveillance of the everyday, encompassed a multiplatform format, raised questions about staging or framing and relied greatly on online audience involvement.
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CHAPTER THREE: THE CONSTRUCTED NARRATIVE OF THE DOCUMENTARY SERIES
Introduction Based on the footage of the livestream of Super Stream Me, a documentary series also called Super Stream Me containing four episodes of approximately 30 minutes was made. The series aired in November 2015 on VPRO national television, two months after the experiment ended. The highlight clips that are still available on the Super Stream Me website form a large part of the livestream footage that has been used in the documentary series. In this chapter, a few of these highlights will be discussed in the way they are presented and reflected upon in the documentary. The reason I selected these clips is because their display and usage within the documentary can show the way the series constructs a narrative with a clear-cut message. Next to the livestream images, several experts appear to comment on the events, on the participants of Super Stream Me and on how the participants reacted to and were transformed by the experiment. The experts come from different specialisms such as philosophy and psychology. By incorporating people from these professional disciplines, the programme makers made a very clear statement: Super Stream Me is to be regarded as a psychological experiment and will be presented that way. Although Super Stream Me is also a media experiment, the documentary fails to interpret or illustrate the project in that manner, suggesting that it was a deliberate decision not to include a media expert in the documentary to comment on the way Super Stream Me functioned as a media experiment. The documentary gives the impression to be a mere summary of the livestream experiment, when in fact the series has a clear constructed narrative and every episode presents a different theme with a distinct function. So the main objective of this chapter is to analyse how this narrative is constructed in order to show how the documentary is more than solely a summary. In order to do such an analysis, it is important to discuss the different modes of documentary and how documentary and reality TV relate to each other. Based on the theoretical findings, the different manners in which the livestream experiment is reflected upon in the documentary series will be analysed in order to display the constructed narrative these reflections embody. This will be done in three separate sections, with each section referring to a different way of reflecting upon the experiment. The first section covers the voice-over that exists in the documentary. This is the voice of Nicolaas Veul, one of the two participants and programme maker of Super
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Stream Me. In the second section, the commentary by various experts will be discussed in the way this commentary contains a highly dystopian message that the programme makers seek to convey. In the third and final section, the incorporated tweets from users of the hashtag #ssm15 will be discussed. In the documentary a selection of Twitter feeds concerning Super Stream Me is presented. The tweets enter the image of the screen with a whistle-like sound and they relate to the footage of the livestream that is being shown. It will be argued that with these Twitter feeds, the programme makers were able to make a statement in an implicit manner, next to the explicit statements of the voice-over and the experts’ commentaries.
Modes of Documentary In Introduction to Documentary, Bill Nichols distinguishes six different modes of representation: poetic, expository, observational, participatory, reflexive and performative (2001: 99). He explains how each mode is set up from conventions and provides specific expectations relating to a particular time and place. The order of the six modes is roughly chronological for newer modes were formed from dissatisfaction with the former (Nichols 2001: 101). It is important to understand that a documentary does not have to use only one type of mode and that within a documentary several modes can overlap. This is also the case with Super Stream Me. The series has elements of the observational mode, considering the constant present camera that records the action as it unfolds which is characteristic for the observational documentary (Nichols 2001: 109). It also contains the participatory mode, where the filmmaker goes into the field to give “a sense of what it is like for the filmmaker to be in a given situation and how that situation alters as a result” (Nichols 2001: 116). Tim and Nicolaas experienced for themselves what is was like to lose every form of privacy. However, in this experience they were both filmmaker and subject. For that reason, the documentary series also reflects the performative mode, for it emphasizes the subjective and affective dimensions of the experiment (Nichols 2001: 131). The observational mode emerged after World War II when light weighted camera equipment was developed and the use of portable cameras that could be easily operated by one person increased (Nichols 2001: 109). Stella Bruzzi defines the mission of the observational documentary as offering “a real possibility of showing events and people in as unadulterated a state as possible” (2000: 68). However, the problem with this mode is that there exists an observational ideal of objectivity and a transparent style,
36 but this level of “purity” can never be obtained (Bruzzi 2000: 70). Bruzzi goes on by explaining how the observational documentary then developed into the “docusoap” in the way that it remained distinctly “observational”, but incorporated tactics and techniques of the more participatory, reflexive and performative modes (2000: 75). Annette Hill defines the docusoap as a “combination of observational documentary, and character-driven drama” (2005: 27). So reality television relates to documentary in the way it has inherited forms of the documentary as well as parted from it. Different documentary traditions have influenced the development of reality TV: these are the French tradition of cinema verité, the American tradition of direct cinema and the British tradition of “fly on the wall” (Bignell 2005: 11). The French and American traditions aim to produce an intimate relation with their public. These documentaries seek to capture events as they unfold, which means they engage with a more observational mode (Bignell 2005: 11). The docusoap prioritises entertainment over social commentary, which sets it apart from the observational documentary, and it formed the second wave of reality programming in the mid- to late nineties as is described in chapter one. Next to the “fly on the wall” kind of programmes such Airport (BBC, 1996 – 2008) and One Born Every Minute (Channel 4, 2010 – present), another type of docusoap dominated reality programming: lifestyle, make-over reality programmes. The essential traits of these programmes are ordinary people and their ordinary recreational activities for example cooking, gardening or fashion (Hill 2005: 29). Wife Swap (Channel 4, 2003 – 2009), Changing Rooms (BBC, 1996 – 2004), What Not to Wear (TLC, 2003 – 2013); all these types of programmes revolve around ordinary people who are transformed into extraordinary people. Jonathan Bignell sees in this a key component of the cinema verité and direct cinema traditions that has worked its way through reality television: it relates to the purpose of the programme, namely emphasizing moments of crisis and transformation (2005: 12). Important to note is that it is not the action, but the reaction of the participants that is of the essence in these programmes. How the participants react and respond to transformation is what the audience aims to see: a possible moment of embarrassment, outrage or personal overcome (Hill 2005: 30). Super Stream Me revolved around the observation of two people’s lives. In this case the participants were already “celebrities” in the sense they were established filmmakers. This means in the documentary Tim and Nicolaas also had a role as makers
37 and the documentary can be seen in line with their previous work that was also of a participatory and performative nature, such as Een man weet niet wat hij mist (VPRO, 2013) and Oudtopia (VPRO, 2014). However, next to their role as filmmakers in a participatory and performative mode, Tim and Nicolaas were also participants in Super Stream Me, who were made ordinary again due to the constant monitoring. This observational mode was made possible through the highly mobile cameras that could be taken anywhere. It blurred the boundaries between private and public for their every move was made visible. Alongside the monitoring, moments of crisis and transformation were central to the experiment. The main question Super Stream Me participants wanted to answer was what would happen when one relinquishes every form of privacy. It implies a transformation, a change of state. The transformation alludes to the situation that alters, when the filmmaker finds himself in that given situation, as explained by Nichols (2001: 116). The interpretation of this transformation regarding Tim and Nicolaas could be considered as the central aspect of the documentary series that followed the livestream experiment. In four episodes their transformation is being disclosed, interpreted and reflected upon. In the next part of this chapter it will be discussed how this reflection is constructed into a narrative and how this narrative is presented.
Construction of a Narrative The titles of the four different documentary episodes allude to their overall theme: “Everything to get likes?!” (5 November 2015), “Big Brother is you” (12 November 2015), “Shame(lessness)” (19 November 2015) and “Flatliner” (26 November 2015) tell the story of the psychological, emotional and physical transformations the participants underwent. This story is for the most part told chronologically, meaning each episode takes the viewer one step closer to the climax of the entire series: the breakdown of Tim and Nicolaas and the early end of the experiment. The documentary series functions as a look back on the livestreaming experiment and tries to link what the participants did on a micro level (two people giving up their own privacy completely) to a what it could mean on a macro level (when privacy would no longer exist in today’s social media society). The transformation of the Super Stream Me participants is thereby placed in a broader context (each theme of the episodes relating to a different context) and the documentary provides social commentary on today’s social media environment where
38 people increasingly share their private lives to a wide public without having an understanding of the consequences. The commentary is depicted in moments of reflection within the documentary. The reflection can take three different forms: a voice- over by Nicolaas Veul, which describes the changes and transitions that are being shown, but also functions as a look back; commentary by experts of different fields (several philosophers, a neuropsychiatrist, privacy experts, vloggers); and the inclusion of tweets from users who used the hashtag #ssm15 on Twitter during the livestream experiment. These three types of reflection will be discussed in the coming analysis on the documentary series. It will be examined how the selected highlight clips are embedded into the documentary and how they are reflected upon in these three different forms. Based on the analysis, it will be argued the voice-over, the commentary by the experts and the incorporated tweets generate the constructed narrative of the documentary series which the programme makers seek to tell.
The Voice-Over The voice-over can be perceived as an overt demonstration of how “pure” events are being constructed in a documentary, which makes the representation subjective (Bruzzi 2000: 9). In Super Stream Me the voice-over functions as the narrator that guides the viewer through the process of the experiment. This voice-over is the voice of the participants and programme maker Nicolaas Veul. It immediately makes the narration biased for the voice-over does not belong to an unknown character that is never shown, but the voice-over is involved with the experiment. The former relates to the expository mode of documentary in which the narrator provides a “voice-of-God” commentary that “emphasizes the impression of objectivity and well-supported argument” (Nichols 2001: 107). The latter, the type of narration incorporated in Super Stream Me, can be associated with the performative mode where the filmmaker is visible and tries to assert a message through the “personal quality of the commentary” (Nichols 2001: 134). The voice-over constructs a story for the viewer based on the images of the livestream. In the first episode “Everything to get likes?!” broadcasted on 5 November 2015, the different ways the Super Stream Me participants react to and relate to the now constant present camera form the main theme or topic. Six minutes into the episode Nicolaas states: “Quickly it becomes clear we both react to the streaming in a very different way. While Tim tries to ignore the camera, I feel the enormous pressure to entertain the viewer”. By making this statement at the beginning of the episode it tells
39 the viewers of the documentary how to interpret the coming events. It prepares them for the climax of this first part of the documentary series: a confrontation between Tim and Nicolaas (one of the highlights on 28 August 2015, see attachment two). The hyper- awareness of Nicolaas towards the camera is starting to frustrate Tim throughout the first days of the experiment, although he neglects to confront him about it. Instead, Tim decides to talk to his psychologist about the way Nicolaas is irritating him. In the documentary, footage of Nicolaas’ stream is shown in which he is watching Tim’s stream on the Super Stream Me website while he is in therapy. In these moments the documentary contains elements of the reflexive mode. Reflexive documentaries tend to emphasize the constructed nature of film: it is not about the engagement between filmmaker and subject, but between filmmaker and viewer (Nichols 2001: 125). Documentaries representing the reflexive mode, often show camera equipment to heighten the viewer’s awareness the film is a construction and the filmmaker addresses the audience directly (Nichols 2001: 126). In the highlight “A confrontation between Tim and Nicolaas”, the presence of cameras is extremely enhanced for viewers are watching a stream within a stream within a documentary. It is the same kind of hypermediacy that was discussed in the previous chapter regarding the television appearances. However, the documentary fails to point out the notion of the “double livestream” and the direct mediation of the real life. Instead the focus lies with the emotional and personal interrelations between the participants and the reactions to their transformations, which are magnified and dramatized for the purpose of the dramatic structure of the episode. Near the end the voice-over contributes to the dramatization and increases suspense: “When Tim bikes home, tweets are flooding in. More and more people tune in to watch the upcoming confrontation. A situation that normally stays private, now becomes a public event. But how does one argue, when everybody is watching?”. In the image the number of viewers is visible which is rapidly increasing, accompanied by fast- paced music to indicate and add to the intensity of what is about to happen. By resulting the narration with a question, it suggests the viewer is about to witness the answer. The voice-over prepares the viewer for the inevitable confrontation and more importantly, it makes sure the viewer understands the impact of the scene. Thereby the voice-over in Super Stream Me tells a story in a descriptive and suggestive manner in order to lead the
40 viewer through the dramatic structure and to make clear what the viewer has to take from each episode. However, every episode ends with the voice-over giving an overall conclusion with respect to the episode’s theme and what lesson can be learned from it. This means the voice-over does not only function as a descriptive narrator, but is also imbedded to assert a message or something to think about. Through this conclusion at the end, the voice-over is reflecting upon the events of the livestream, on the overall theme of the episode, and how the viewer should interpret them. Therefore the voice-over is one of the ways the programme makers can construct a narrative within the documentary series. In Super Stream Me, Nicolaas Veul is the narrator of every episode, not Tim den Besten. This says something about the relation between Nicolaas and Tim: by letting Nicolaas be the voice-over, he is being portrayed as a filmmaker to a greater extent than Tim. His role alludes more to one of a maker than one of a subject. And by positioning Nicolaas in this way, Tim gets to be more of a participant in the documentary. This relation is also the case in earlier work: Tim was the one that shared the bed with a woman in Een man weet niet wat hij mist, for example. It results in a relation in which Tim is more the “celebrity” between the two men; he is the “funny one” or the one that constantly finds himself in bizarre situations, such as the “pooping moment” or when he revealed his telephone number on national television. This could also be the reason Tim does not function as the narrator of Super Stream Me, but does serve as the voice of the intro of the documentary. Every episode starts with a leader of 30 seconds, which forms a short introduction to the documentary series. Tim being the narrator of this leader could refer to Tim as being the “face” or the “image” of the programme. The fact Tim and Nicolaas both fulfil these different roles is also part of the construction of a narrative within the documentary.
Commentary by Experts In the documentary series several experts from different fields discuss their observations regarding the transformations that the participants are going through due to the lack of privacy. The experts’ commentaries are also incorporated in three different ways: Tim and Nicolaas each visited a different psychologist during the experiment and in these therapy sessions their progress, pitfalls and insecurities were discussed; also, the participants had various interviews with experts during the livestream experiment, for example with privacy experts from Bits of Freedom or with famous vloggers who
41 shared their view on privacy; and lastly, different philosophers and a neuropsychiatrist commented on footage of the livestream after the experiment was finished and these images are edited into the documentary next to the images of the stream. The first two ways of commentary show that moments of reflection were already being pursued during the experiment and not only after it was finished. This underlines the point of departure of Super Stream Me: the experiment was of social and psychological nature and is treated that way by emphasizing the psychological consequences of the experiment even before it was clear what these consequences were going to be. The programme makers therefore made a very deliberate decision by involving psychologists and privacy experts, and by asking philosophers and a neuropsychiatrist to reflect on the experiment: it highlights the intention of Super Stream Me as a psychological experiment. This is displayed in the way the highlight “Tim poops for the first time” is presented in the first episode of the series, “Everything to get likes?!”. Next to the footage of Tim on the toilet, images of Nicolaas’ stream are shown and the viewer can see how Nicolaas is watching Tim’s livestream together with five or six other people. Again, the livestream is being watched within the livestream, which illustrates the reflexive mode of the documentary. The highlight is succeeded by a montage sequence of the press presentation of Super Stream Me: in every interview the “pooping moment” is brought up, which indicates the high media visibility of the livestream and the hype around the word “poop” as explained earlier. The documentary therefore points out the media attention that Super Stream Me received, but it does not provide commentary or reflect upon this notion of event TV. Instead, Rob Wijnberg, one of the philosophers that comments on the events of the press presentation, only mentions the pressure that comes with constantly being watched: “The more social media are playing a part in your life and the more you share on those platforms, (…) the more pressure it puts on the way you manifest yourself and on the way you think others perceive you”. Wijnberg is explicitly being portrayed as a philosopher in the documentary, even though he is also a journalist (he founded the online journalist platform De Correspondent). It suggests he has to operate and give his commentary from a certain perspective. And with respect to his comments on the press presentation, Wijnberg emphasizes the psychological impact of sharing your most intimate moments to the public, but observations on how the “pooping moment” displayed Super Stream Me as a media event are not being taken into
42 consideration. The only way the documentary addresses this is by including Twitter feeds from the moment Tim is on the toilet: it stresses the intertwining of several media platforms and the engagement of the livestream with Twitter. These tweets are only shown in the documentary and are not explicitly commented on by the experts. However, the presented Twitter feeds are accompanied by noises and sound, which highlights the obtrusive and pushy character of social media. Therefore the tweets suit the image of Tim and Nicolaas not being able to escape the online world. This means the presentation of the tweets in the documentary reinforces the notion of psychological impact and it heightens the argument the experts are trying to convey, which will be discussed in more detail in the next section. Another function of the experts in the documentary, aside from drawing attention to the psychological consequences of the experiment, is to alarm or warn the viewers about their heavy social media use and the darker sides of technology. In the second episode “Big Brother is you”, voyeurism and looking at oneself through the eyes of others are the central topics that are discussed. The episode shows the meeting Tim and Nicolaas had with two privacy experts from Bits of Freedom on 7 September 2015, day thirteen of the experiment. One of the experts, Daphne van der Kroft, places the Super Stream Me experiment in a broader context: “Basically, what you experience as individuals is what we experience as a society (…) and it will get worse and worse in the future. (…) The boundaries between online and offline are very clear at this moment, but they will become a grey area”. This is a clear message for the public: with the increasing use of social media, people will lose their understanding of the separation between an online and an offline existence, which in turn will cause people to lose their sense of privacy. The commentary forms a highly dystopian and pessimistic message. It is a portrayal of the “transparent” life described in Dave Eggers’ novel, which formed the inspiration for the experiment and therefore it is important for the programme makers to make sure this idea comes across. It also highlights that Tim and Nicolaas are not only participants but programme makers as well: during the interview with the privacy experts, they operate from a different perspective and change their attitude from the role of participant to the role of documentary maker. In the next episode “Shame(lessness)”, the documentary creates two storylines about how the participants both deal with their sense of shame in a different way. Tim is more about pushing the boundaries, whereas Nicolaas finds himself holding back, for he
43 worries about the judgement of his viewers. During the experiment, they visited a professional livestream vlogger, Josh V, who created an entire brand around herself and this footage is part of the third episode. Philosopher Hans Schnitzler then comments on the distressing aspects of the idea of self-branding: “Where we are heading and where we partially already live in, is a society in which you constantly have to worry about how your self-display is coming across”. He continues by putting this development in a negative light: “We will have to obtain a form of alertness like a wild animal to an increasing extent in order to constantly keep an eye on the way our self-display is enfolding, and I believe this will only get much more intense over time”. These examples from different episodes display how the incorporation of commentary by experts thereby also functions as social commentary for it criticizes today’s social media environment and to a certain extent predicts a dystopian world in which privacy will no longer prevail. The commentary contributes to the documentary as a narrative by means of conveying a message regarding social media and privacy in a highly negative way. And the Super Stream Me participants form the living proof of this message that is being imparted. The experts show how the documentary series is not only a look back on the experiment, as a “pure observation”, but contains a constructed meaning as well. The set-up of the Super Stream Me documentary can be connected to Morgan Spurlock’s documentary Super Size Me (2004). This participatory and performative film formed a relentless critique to the fast food industry with a pronounced dystopian message and an obvious physical as well as psychological transformation. The title of Super Stream Me is a reference to Spurlock’s documentary and it therefore acknowledges its similar structure to Super Size Me.
Twitter Feeds In the previous chapter it has been discussed how the livestream of Super Stream Me existed on multiple platforms and how it engaged with other platforms such as Twitter. The multiplatform format is emphasized again in the documentary series following the livestream. The programme makers have included a selection of tweets from users who used the hashtag #ssm15 during the experiment into the episodes of the documentary. The Twitter feeds from #ssm15-users within the documentary add to the construction of a narrative and the story that is being told. The tweets are the direct reactions of the viewers on the footage of the livestream. By incorporating these reactions, the documentary seeks to portray the “public opinion” and how the viewers were
44 responding to the actions and complete surveillance of the participants. The Twitter feeds highlight the on-going filming process of the livestream, for the participants are never free from someone’s opinion or comment. This idea is depicted in the way the tweets are presented in a visual as well as in an auditory manner: when tweets enter the image they overlap the footage of the livestream, so the viewer is encouraged to read the content. And in addition to this foregrounding manner of presentation, the entering of tweets is accompanied by a high-pitched, whistle-like sound to draw even more attention to it. Therefore the visual and auditory way of presenting the Twitter feeds relates to the idea of today’s social media environment and how it is almost impossible to escape from the constant presence of these social media. The inclusion of tweets in the documentary and moreover, the manner these tweets are displayed, thus heighten the dystopian, negative message of the documentary series. However, it is important to take into consideration that the tweets that are being showed in the documentary are a small selection of all the tweets regarding #ssm15. The programme makers selected the tweets in order to say something about the events of the episode; they are not random. In the episode “Everything to get likes?!”, the highlight of day two of the experiment in which Nicolaas has dinner with good friends Mas and Maxim is displayed. This highlight clip shows how Nicolaas and his friends are struggling to have a decent conversation with the camera present, so Nicolaas decides to put the camera at “a safe distance”. In the documentary tweets from several users enter the image: “@NclsVeul heeey we cannot hear anything like this!! #ssm15 #sharingiscaring” and “It is boring like this @NclsVeul… #ssm15”. These tweets are the direct comments from users reflecting upon the events of the livestream. In the documentary they form the thoughts and beliefs from the public, so viewers of the documentary are then told how to interpret the situation. By incorporating the Twitter feeds, the documentary does not only guide the viewer to a certain interpretation or perspective in an explicit manner as with the voice-over and commentaries by experts, but also in an implicit one by showing comments from viewers. In the case of this highlight, the tweets are accompanied by the voice-over and experts’ commentary, but other cases show how a statement can be made by solely entering tweets in the image. This is depicted in the way the highlight “Tim does something very stupid” is included in the third episode of the documentary. In “Shame(lessness)”, the storyline around Tim and how he keeps pushing the boundaries of his sense of shame is
45 concluded by showing how he gives away his telephone number to the viewers. There are no narrations or observations from experts that are edited into the highlight clip. However, the programme makers still tell a story by means of Twitter feeds and other visual aspects that appear in the image. At the top of the image the number of viewers of the livestream is visible, which stands at 1489. This is an important element to take into consideration. It indicates the high interest and attention towards Super Stream Me at that specific moment, when the livestream was also aired on television, given that normally the amount of online viewers fluctuated between 400 and 600. Also, at the bottom of the image the following appears: “Tweet along! #ssm15”, which derives from the official Super Stream Me Twitter account @SuperStreamMe. The programme makers try to invoke the same interaction and audience participation with the documentary as was the case with the livestream. And by showing tweets that were tweeted during the livestream into the documentary, the audience involvement is featured again. When the footage shows how Tim is talking to strangers on the telephone, tweets are starting to enter the image in a fast pace and in a high quantity accompanied by whistle-like noises and sounds in the same dramatized way as with the presentation of the highlight “A confrontation between Tim and Nicolaas” in the first episode. In addition to this dramatized way of displaying Twitter feeds, the content of the tweets underlines the story that is being conveyed: “very stupid tim xx saying your number on tv haha #ssm15”, “#ssm15 such a weird experiment. Too bad about the airing time”, “#ssm15 we are watching for over 4h straight”, “You will be sorry for yourselves for a long long time… #ssm15”. From all the tweets to choose from, it was a deliberate decision to also show tweets that say something about the fact that the Super Stream Me livestream was aired on television that night, because this is not explicitly told to the viewers by means of a voice-over. By incorporating comments on the airing time and the binge watching of viewers, it heightens the multiplatform format of Super Stream Me and brings attention to the high media visibility of the experiment. It portrays the idea of the livestream as a hype, as an event, as something that was trending topic on Twitter. And as such the included tweets construct a narrative on their own.
Conclusion In the documentary series of Super Stream Me, the aim is to give a summary of the experiment and to look back and reflect on the transformations the participants underwent and how they reacted to these transformations. Each episode addresses a
46 different aspect of transformation. The documentary reflects upon the transformations caused by the lack of privacy. The series also displays and reflects upon the reactions of the participants to these transformations. For this reason, the point of departure was to present Super Stream Me as a psychological experiment and it is treated that way in the documentary series. It is also the reason the documentary series represents the construction of a narrative and exists to assert a message. This message is brought to the viewers in several ways: by means of a descriptive yet biased voice-over of Nicolaas Veul; by means of commentary given by various experts within the fields of philosophy and psychology; and by means of including tweets from viewers of the livestream who used the hashtag #ssm15 during the experiment. This chapter has shed light on the different modes of Super Stream Me as a documentary series and the analysis showed it mostly contains elements of the observational, the participatory and the performative modes. In the documentary, these modes manifest the suggestion of a summary, but in fact they form a pronounced, highly dystopian message that is being conveyed to the audience. The social commentary that is incorporated into the series forms the main narrative of the documentary, which is creating awareness for the importance of privacy in today’s social media environment in which privacy is being threatened by social media. The programme makers made a deliberate choice by presenting Super Stream Me as a psychological experiment instead of a media experiment to get their point across. It was a deliberate choice to refer to Super Size Me for it portrays the similarities between the construction and the similar modes of the documentaries. And the participants, who also fulfilled the role of filmmakers, thereby functioned as the living proof of the social commentary that was the point of departure of Super Stream Me.
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CHAPTER FOUR: THE INVESTED VIEWER
Introduction Audience participation was crucial for the Super Stream Me experiment to succeed. It resulted in an ambivalent relation between the participants and its viewers. On the one hand, Tim and Nicolaas needed an active audience to answer their question what happens to a person when one’s privacy is taken away. But on the other, they broke down due to the constant presence of viewers who were able to watch their lives every moment of the day. An active audience was therefore essential to the experiment, not only for the participants, but also for the producers of the programme. In this chapter, I will examine the role of the invested viewer in Super Stream Me and how this role changes from a positive and necessary contribution to the programme to a negative position of being the cause of the lack of privacy. The goal of this chapter is to discuss the different relations the viewers had with Tim and Nicolaas, and with the producers of the programme. In the first section of this chapter, the relation between the viewers and the participants Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul will be analysed. The notion of Henry Jenkins’ participatory culture will be used to address the usage of the hashtag #ssm15 during the time the livestream of Super Stream Me was online. Also, ideas of online fandom and notions of identification towards Tim and Nicolaas by means of user- generated content will be discussed. It will be argued that the relation between Tim and Nicolaas and their viewers was more than a parasocial relation or imaginary relation, since it was not merely one-sided. The viewers formed a community that interacted with Tim and Nicolaas. In the second section, the viewer’s relation towards the producers will be discussed. The user-generated content along with the active participation and extra effort from viewers was used as content for the Super Stream Me documentary. This content can be regarded as “free labour”, which Mark Andrejevic explains as the productivity of online fans. In this part, I will discuss how the “free labour” of the viewers existed on three levels: viewers were stimulated to promote Super Stream Me by tweeting with the hashtag #ssm15 and thereby increasing its media visibility. This was the case for the livestream as well as for the documentary. Next, viewers functioned as a part of the narrative by being portrayed as the main reason why the experiment ended early. And finally, the viewers’ tweets were used as content for the documentary without their consent. By analysing these different relations between viewers and participants
48 next to viewers and producers, it will become more clear Super Stream Me was not just a psychological experiment as it was presented, but also functioned as a constructed, pre- planned television production to a greater extent than was revealed to the public.
Two New Best Friends In the first chapter of this research, I discussed how the multiplatform format maximizes audience engagement with a programme (Roscoe 2004; Tincknell and Raghuram 2004; Kavka 2011). It allows for the viewers to interact with a television programme in several ways. Super Stream Me mostly used Twitter to enhance the audience participation. This was the case during the livestream, where Twitters feeds were being displayed in a banner at the bottom of the image in real-time, and also during the broadcasting of the documentary where the audience was stimulated to “Tweet along!” by the official Super Stream Me Twitter account @SuperStreamMe. Via Twitter the viewers were able to interact with the programme, with the participants and programme makers, and with each other. This interaction was possible by using the hashtag #ssm15, which connected viewers and fans of Super Stream Me. This relates to the notion of participatory culture. Henry Jenkins describes how this term contrasts with older ideas about passive spectatorship, as nowadays media producers and consumers no longer fulfil separate or different roles. Instead, the viewers can now be seen as participants, who engage and interact with one another and who turn into prosumers (Jenkins 2006: 3). With respect to Super Stream Me, tweeting with the #ssm15 hashtag generated a participatory audience, during the livestream experiment and during the broadcasting of the documentary. Next to the notion of participatory culture, it was the hashtag #ssm15 that formed the viewers into an online community. In Tune in, Log on: Soaps, Fandom and Online Community, Nancy Baym argues that “the Internet makes audience communities more common, more visible, and more accessible, enabling fans to find one another with ease, regardless of geography, and enhancing the importance of the interpersonal dimensions of fandom” (2000: 215). In other words, even though fan groups and audience communities existed before the Internet did, because of the Internet and the multiplatform programmes fan communities have been able to proliferate. In the case of Super Stream Me, the hashtag #ssm15 was the online space where viewers could meet and converse about the programme. On Twitter the Super Stream Me fans could interact with each other and discuss the actions of the livestream. This does not mean every user
49 of the hashtag was automatically part of the community, but the viewers who regarded themselves as fans, who knew and recognized one another from the hashtag #ssm15 and who tweeted about Super Stream Me regularly can be seen as part of this community of invested viewers. Moreover, interaction did not only exist amongst viewers, but also between the viewers and the participants of Super Stream Me. Tim, @avonturenvantim, and Nicolaas, @NclsVeul, were also active on Twitter using the hashtag #ssm15 and responded to tweets from the audience via their personal accounts or they read tweets from viewers out loud in the livestream. For this reason the interaction on Twitter was not merely of parasocial nature. Parasocial interaction is a concept coined by Horton and Wohl in 1956, which describes the apparent face-to-face relationship with a media personality (Tian and Hoffner 2010: 251). A parasocial relation alludes to an imaginary relationship or the illusion of a real relation that the viewer has with a media figure, for the interaction or relationship is one-sided. The interaction viewers of Super Stream Me had with Tim and Nicolaas was not unilateral, since Tim and Nicolaas also interacted with and responded to their viewers via Twitter. However, it was an unequal relation, for the participants could address and talk to viewers via the camera whereas viewers could only talk back to their screens. This form of interplay shows resemblance with older television programmes such as call TV or with more traditional media as the radio. One of the important reasons the communication between the viewers and the Super Stream Me participants was possible, was because the amount of viewers and amount of users of the hashtag #ssm15 was not extremely high. Normally, between 400 and 600 viewers were watching the livestream at the same time, which is a lot of people, but cannot be regarded as a mass audience. Therefore the Twitter feeds stayed manageable to read and react to for Tim and Nicolaas and with respect to the viewers, Tim and Nicolaas stayed approachable and recognizable. Only during the television broadcasting the ratings were much higher, but even that night it did not constitute a mass audience. Because of the relatively small group of viewers, the identification with and the intimacy between the participants and the invested viewers was maintained. And identification with a media personality can be increased by the viewer’s parasocial interaction with this media figure. The more the viewer is parasocially engaged with a character, the more similarity and identification the viewer will experience towards that character (Tian and Hoffner 2010: 265). So the active communication between the Super
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Stream Me viewers and the participants reinforced their relationship, which in turn increased the viewer’s identification with the two men. This is depicted in one of the blogs created by Super Stream Me fan Matijn (who also appears in the livestream when Tim and Nicolaas visit him on day fourteen, see attachment two). He wrote a blog called “Five reasons why you should watch Super Stream Me” in which he explains how suddenly you gain “two new best friends” whom you get to know personally, who are people just like you and who are not perfect (nieuw.matijn.nl). Matijn explained how for a lot of viewers Super Stream Me formed an insight in the world of two young gay men living in Amsterdam. Because of the interaction between viewers and participants, these viewers identified themselves with Tim and Nicolaas and their lives, considering them as “two new best friends”. Next to this blog, invested viewers of Super Stream Me created numerous other blogs, fan pages and Twitter accounts. This alludes to the idea of consumers occupying the role of producers, as Jenkins argues (2006: 3). The extra material is called user- generated content, which could refer to any form of content that was created by users, often through interaction with other users and sustained by social media platforms (Moens, Li and Chua 2014: 8). Since Super Stream Me relied heavily on the interrelation with Twitter and other social media such as Facebook and YouTube, a significant amount of user-generated content was produced. For instance, every tweet posted by a viewer with the hashtag #ssm15 can be regarded as user-generated content. Also, YouTube videos from footage of the livestream that viewers put online and shared on social media can be included. And comparable to the blog “Five reasons you should watch Super Stream Me”, viewers would occasionally put in a great deal of effort in their creations as well. Fan Iljan (who also appeared in the livestream when he and Tim meet on day six, see attachment two) developed a website called superstreamquotes.nl (although it no longer exists) on which he collected and posted noticeable, funny or entertaining quotes of the Super Stream Me participants during the livestream experiment. And on Twitter, a @superstreamfans account was created. On this account polls were posted with Super Stream Me related questions to elicit discussion amongst fans, for instance “Alright #superstreamers: was the production WRONG or RIGHT to publish the Whatsapp conversations?” #polloftheday #ssm15” (@superstreamfans, 30- 08-2015) and “Alright #superstreamers: are Tim and Nicolaas continuing the experiment until the end YES or NO” #polloftheday #ssm15” (@superstreamfans, 01-09-
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2015). Furthermore, the account used the hashtag #teamtim to indicate Tim den Besten was the favourite participant of the experiment for the fans behind the account. However, it should be noted that the @superstreamfans account only attained a following of 26 people and it followed 58 people. Again, these numbers cannot be considered a large amount of invested viewers, but it did not make the effort put into the account less valuable to the viewers or to Super Stream Me itself. Because of the small amount of invested viewers, it was possible to form strong relations amongst each other. The interaction between viewers and between viewers and participants mostly existed online. However, the interaction could occur offline as well. This is displayed in the encounters with Super Stream Me fans Matijn and Iljan, but also in the Facebook event that was created: Fan Meeting Super Stream Me, on 10 September 2015 at 8pm, organized by two fans of the livestream. Not only would several fans and followers of the experiment be present to meet each other and talk about their favourite programme, Super Stream Me participants Tim and Nicolaas would also attend the event. Although the experiment ended early on the morning of 10 September, the fan meeting was not cancelled and Tim and Nicolaas still showed up, even though it would not add anything to the experiment for the cameras were not present. It indicates the strong relation the invested viewers had with one another, and moreover, it illustrates the maintained intimacy between the viewers and the participants. What all these different examples show, is that the user-generated content around Super Stream Me, whether it were tweets, blogs, websites, YouTube videos, discussion questions or fan meetings, was created to maximise the interaction between viewers and between viewers and participants. The created content therefore reinforced these interrelations and contributed to the notion of a participatory audience and the forming of a community amongst the invested viewers, who dedicated their time and effort to generate extra material concerning Super Stream Me. The community established a sense of intimacy amongst viewers and between viewers and participants, which is why the multiplatform format is attractive for viewers as explained in chapter one. For the audience, it was a way to express their fandom, but for the programme makers the extra content meant more exposure and more media visibility, which benefited the experiment and added to the idea of Super Stream Me as an event. Therefore, the invested viewers did not only relate to other viewers and the
52 participants, but also to the producers of Super Stream Me. This relation will be examined in the next section of this chapter.
The “Free Labour” of the Viewers Mark Andrejevic argues that in today’s social media environment, “viewers are increasingly encouraged to climb out of the couch to embrace a more ‘active’ approach to their viewing experience” (2008: 25). In other words, viewers are stimulated to participate and become an active audience in order for the producers and programme makers to benefit and exploit this unpaid labour. However, for viewers it does not have to come across as exploitation, because from their point of view the promise of online forums, chats and official websites lies within the possibility to have their voices heard by the producers. By commenting on a programme and giving feedback, the viewer may believe their input can lead to improvement of a programme (Andrejevic 2008: 28). This implies a double interest: one from the producer’s and the other from the viewer’s perspective. And within this context, the programme itself is no longer the final product, but forms the basis to which value is added by paid as well as unpaid workers (Andrejevic 2008: 32). In the case of Super Stream Me, the work done by paid workers can refer to the written daily reports that summarize a day of the livestream experiment or to the selected highlights that are available on the website. Next to this paid labour, the value of Super Stream Me rests on the work of fans and active viewers to a great extent, as the examples of the previous section show. The ways the producers of Super Stream Me took this “free labour” and used it to benefit the livestream as well as the documentary series that followed the experiment, will be discussed below. Viewers and fans of Super Stream Me were stimulated to tweet about the experiment and to use the hashtag #ssm15. The encouragement took place at two different moments: throughout the sixteen-day livestream experiment as well as during the broadcasting of the documentary. For the invested viewers, Twitter became the common meeting place to engage with the programme. Since often not much happened in the livestream (Tim and Nicolaas also filmed themselves while they were lying on the couch, playing videogames or sleeping at night), tweeting with fellow viewers was a way to make it more interesting and entertaining. This viewing behaviour of the active audience reflects the idea of social television, which can be defined as “the social practice of commenting on television shows with peers, friends, and unknown people, who are all connected together through various digital devices” (Selva 2016: 160). Social
53 television thus underlines the simultaneous use of several media, mostly television and social media, in which social media function as a “second screen” (Selva 2016: 161). For the audience of Super Stream Me, the livestream was an on-going programme they could tune into at any moment of the day and simultaneously use Twitter in a manner similar to chatrooms to discuss the events (or often non-events) with other viewers, as a social practice. This practice was also stimulated for their tweets would be shown real-time in the banner that was featured at the bottom of the livestream, which reinforced the idea of a chatroom. However, the four documentary episodes were broadcasted on television, which places Super Stream Me in a different context. Instead of uninterrupted television, the Super Stream Me documentary portrayed an edited, constructed television series with less focus on stimulating social practices of the audience, with the exception of the occasional request to “Tweet along!” that appeared in the image. It could be argued that for the producers it was more important that the livestream functioned as a form of social television, instead of the documentary series. The livestream had the potential to be a televisual event, so stimulating social practices with respect to the livestream was a way of increasing the media visibility of the entire experiment. The more attention and interaction existed around the livestream, the more successful the programme would be, for the main objective was to examine what happens to a person that loses every form of privacy. Moreover, if the livestream enjoyed a great deal of attention in the form of social practices such as Twitter feeds and fan videos, the more these practices could be used and deployed as a part of the dramatic structure of the documentary. In this sense, the invested viewers of Super Stream Me performed a certain kind of “free labour” for the programme makers, adding value to the programme by means of tweeting and other user-generated content, and thereby increasing media visibility. Another way the extra material functioned as “free labour”, was by using it as a component of the constructed narrative in the documentary series. However, as has been argued in the previous chapter, the documentary contained a highly negative and dystopian message regarding today’s social media environment and the excessive use of these media. Consequently, in the constructed narrative, the active audience or the participatory viewers were being portrayed with the same negative connotations. The invested viewers were characterized as one of the main reasons Tim and Nicolaas broke down during the experiment. In the fourth and last documentary episode “Flatliner” (26 November 2015), the viewers are addressed as “voyeurs” or “pushy viewers” from
54 which the participants were not able to escape. The constant Twitter feeds, the continuous monitoring, the never-ending opinions of strangers; in the documentary series these were the factors that were presented as the main reasons that led to the early end of the experiment. Here the role of the viewers with respect to Super Stream Me changes from active participants who add content to the programme to the negative force that caused the lack of privacy and continued mental pressure on the participants. The programme makers of Super Stream Me thereby portrayed the relation between the viewers and Tim and Nicolaas in a fairly misleading way. In the first section of this chapter, the relation has been discussed as a mutual though unequal relationship in which the viewers regarded Tim and Nicolaas as “two new best friends”, because of the interaction with the participants and their recognizable, identifiable character. Yet in the documentary, the fact that Tim and Nicolaas also communicated and interacted with the viewers and that the relation was not merely one-sided, is being neglected in order to dramatize the narrative. The invested viewer who actively participated with Super Stream Me during the livestream now finds that in the documentary series his active role is accompanied with negative connotations. However, even though the invested viewers could feel used by the producers for they were asked to participate and this participation was then put in a negative light, the viewers still operated and participated voluntarily. The extra effort done by viewers also enhanced their own pleasure. The changing role of the viewer shows how the viewer can participate and occupy the role of producer, but will never be able to control how this participation is used. The effort or “free labour” by the invested viewers was thus used to serve as a story line within the constructed narrative. But in that narrative, the role of the production team was almost completely left out. In chapter two, the control of the production has been briefly discussed in terms of the agreement that existed between Tim and Nicolaas and the producers. Tim and Nicolaas agreed the surveillance would be continuous throughout the experiment, so they were not allowed to turn the cameras off or walk away from them. However, besides this mutual understanding the influence of the producers remains invisible. The only other reference to a backstage production team is when screenshots of Tim’s Whatsapp conversations were posted on Twitter, which made him paranoid and distrustful towards the production. One of the reasons to exclude the role of the producers from the public is because Tim and Nicolaas fulfilled the role of makers as well. Since there was no camera crew, they were filming and
55 operating the cameras themselves. However, this does not mean there were no technicians or data handlers to make the livestreaming possible. Super Stream Me gave the idea that every person was be able to stream his entire life, when in fact it was set up as a professional production, as a television programme, as a documentary series. By putting Tim and Nicolaas in the role of the visible makers of Super Stream Me and leaving out the function of the production team and technical assistance, the programme could be presented as an experiment instead of a pre-planned television production, which it also was. In addition to making the invested viewers part of the constructed narrative, the producers also used the user-generated content as material for the documentary series, referring to the inclusion of tweets. These tweets function as unpaid work done by an active audience, which was used without the viewers’ explicit consent. The inclusion of viewers’ tweets into the documentary could be regarded as two-fold: on the one hand, they could feel flattered that their comments were used, meaning their tweet was interesting enough to be included. On the other, the tweets were incorporated outside of their original context. On Twitter, tweets can be part of an on-going conversation, can encompass a retweet or a reaction to other tweets, from which the content of the tweet derives its meaning. However, in the documentary series, the programme makers took the viewers’ Twitter feeds out of this context, which could lead to a different interpretation of the comment, than if it would be seen as part of a series of tweets. It was another way for the production to use and perhaps even misuse the labour of the invested viewers. The relation between the production and the viewers was therefore also an ambivalent one: the programme makers needed the active audience for their effort and content, and for them to socialize on Twitter, and the viewers attained pleasure from doing this for it made the livestream more interesting and entertaining. However, in the documentary series the production portrayed the viewers in a fairly negative light for the purpose of the constructed narrative and the dramatization of the programme. The role of the producers was made invisible and the negative role of the viewers was heightened to serve the narrative. The programme makers thereby somewhat altered and capitalized the relation the viewers had with Tim and Nicolaas in order to enhance the narrative of the documentary to be more dramatic and to reinforce the message that they wanted to convey.
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Conclusion The invested viewers of Super Stream Me formed different types of relations with each other, with Tim and Nicolaas and with the production team of Super Stream Me. With the use of the hashtag #ssm15 on Twitter, viewers were able to meet and socialize. The interaction amongst viewers and the overlapping roles of consumer and producer contribute to Jenkins’ notion of participatory culture. Also, the online community was enhanced and the interrelations were reinforced, for tweeting and conversing with fellow viewers made the uneventfulness of the stream more eventful. It brought about an active audience that spent time and effort in order to increase their own and other viewers’ pleasure with Super Stream Me. This resulted in user-generated content, which applies to the tweets regarding the #ssm15 hashtag, but also to fan blogs, websites with extra information, videos and screenshots of the livestream, and even an organized fan meeting that was attended by Tim and Nicolaas as well. The participants of Super Stream Me took part in the interaction, as they too were active users of the hashtag #ssm15 and through their own Twitter accounts they communicated with their fans directly. Therefore the relation between viewers and the participants was not solely one-sided or imaginary, similar to that of the fan and the star, and thus not solely parasocial of nature. It made Tim and Nicolaas more recognizable and approachable for the viewers, which in turn stimulated to tweet and talk about Super Stream Me to an even greater extent. The social practices around Super Stream Me increased the media visibility of the programme, which benefited the producers. The producers stimulated these social practices during the livestream experiment and during the broadcasting of the documentary series. This encouragement to “climb out of the couch” contributed to the “free labour” of the invested viewers. The programme makers embraced the effort of the audience by deploying their participation as a part of the constructed narrative of the documentary series. In the documentary, the viewers were portrayed as one of the main reasons Tim and Nicolaas ended the experiment early, because of their constant need to interact with the participants. In this sense, the active and participatory attitudes of the viewers were used by the programme makers, which changed the role of the viewers. The audience was stimulated to tweet about Super Stream Me and afterwards their effort was turned into one of the predominant factors that ended the experiment. This is what makes the relation between the viewers and producers more difficult, especially since the role of the production team is highly neglected in the documentary series. What the
57 relations between the viewers and the participants, and particularly between the viewers and the producers show, is that Super Stream Me was not solely a psychological, daring privacy experiment. It was also a pre-planned, organized television production that needed a dramatized narrative, in which the participation of the invested viewers eventually was reduced to a rather negative role as “voyeurs”, “pushy viewers” and invaders of privacy.
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CONCLUSION: DOUBLE ROLES
One of the highlights of the livestream that can be found on the Super Stream Me website is called “Friend Jan on Nicolaas’ phone use” (see attachment two). In this clip, Jan is confronting Nicolaas with his behaviour throughout the experiment. He criticizes Nicolaas on his excessive phone use and his tendency to focus too much on himself and his self-presentation. The next moment, the highlight cuts to Nicolaas telling how viewers of the livestream are tweeting about friend Jan in a highly positive way. Instantly, Jan is intrigued and runs over to Nicolaas to read along. Together they are glued to the telephone screen and Jan enthusiastically says “I could just look at these tweets all day!”. This example demonstrates the notion of a message or a warning within Super Stream Me, which is what I have argued in this thesis. I have discussed and analysed Super Stream Me with respect to the livestream, the documentary series and the role of the viewers. These different analyses combined, show how Super Stream Me is set up and constructed: on the one hand it is presented as a social, psychological experiment, but, on the other, it contains a clear-cut message and specific point of departure. Inspired by Dave Eggers’ novel The Circle, the main message of Super Stream Me is that social media are dangerous because they invade and threaten our privacy. Friend Jan worries about Nicolaas’ phone use and they are discussing what the experiment is doing to Nicolaas’ behaviour. However, the highlight also shows it only takes a few positive tweets from viewers for Jan himself to be “hooked”. By selecting this footage from the livestream as a highlight clip, it foregrounds the notion that the message of Super Stream Me is being conveyed as a warning and this clip serves to demonstrate how addictive social media can be. And with this message, the goal of Super Stream Me was creating more awareness for the importance of privacy in a social media environment, for privacy forms an important part of our lives that is being threatened. The way Tim den Besten and Nicolaas Veul underwent and participated in the livestream experiment themselves put them in the position of participant. This position was emphasized by situating them as ordinary people who were sharing every aspect of their lives and by focussing on the complete surveillance of their everyday activities. The livestream format therefore showed similarities to that of the reality gameshow (Hill 2005: 24). However, their role as participant was not similar to the position of
59 participants in other reality programmes. Generally participants of reality programmes find themselves having little agency and being controlled by a production team, as Grindstaff argues (2014: 235). But Tim and Nicolaas were programme makers as well. They did not only underwent the experiment, they also co-created and were part of developing Super Stream Me. For that reason, they still obtained different forms of agency. Throughout the livestreaming-days, Tim and Nicolaas were positioned as participants, but they also acted as makers, even though this was not emphasized. Following the experiment, the four-part documentary series was broadcasted. Here their function as filmmakers was highlighted to a greater extent than with respect to the livestream. This mainly applied to Nicolaas, who served as the voice-over of every episode. What the analysis of the documentary can tell is that next to the double role of participant as well as maker, there also existed a difference between Tim and Nicolaas in their position as maker. While Nicolaas fulfilled a more serious role, Tim was portrayed as the “celebrity” of the two as well as the “face” of the programme. However, the position of Tim and Nicolaas as makers with respect to the documentary particularly comes across through the constructed narrative of the series. The documentary consisted of multiple modes, mainly the participatory and the performative mode, as formulated by Nichols (2001: 99). These modes reveal how the constructed narrative contained a clear-cut and highly dystopian message. The message that social media are dangerous thus becomes much more pronounced and concrete in the documentary series, in which the livestream experiment is being used to support that message. The highly negative social commentary therefore marks the point of departure of the documentary of Super Stream Me. The different roles of the viewers of Super Stream Me play a part in the construction of this dystopian message as well. During the livestream the viewers operated as active participants and their participation was stimulated in several ways. This participation resulted in a vast amount of user-generated content regarding Super Stream Me. As such, the programme can be perceived as part of Jenkins’ idea of participatory culture in which the roles of consumer and producer merge, turning the viewers into prosumers (2006: 3). The invested viewers of Super Stream Me actively engaged with the programme and interacted with each other as well as with Tim and Nicolaas, as the example above shows. Their active participation did not only form the invested viewers into an online community, but also increased the media visibility of
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Super Stream Me, which in turn benefited the producers. However, the relation between viewers and producers was a problematic one. On the one hand, the producers stimulated the viewers’ participation, which formed an important contribution to the programme. But on the other, the producers reduced the viewers’ role as invaders of privacy, as in the documentary they were portrayed as one of the main reasons the experiment ended early. The position of the viewers thereby changed from active participant to a negative role of “voyeur” as part of the constructed narrative. The ambivalent relation between the viewers and the producers demonstrates how audience participation was crucial for the experiment to succeed. The double role of Tim and Nicolaas as participant and maker, together with the double role of the viewers as active participant and part of the constructed narrative, both display how Super Stream Me can be interpreted as a media experiment. By analysing the livestream as a reality programme, the constructed narrative of the documentary series and the participation of the viewers, I was able to discuss these different roles and show how Super Stream Me was not only a psychological experiment, but also a media experiment with a clear-cut message.
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Reference List
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Kavka, Misha. Reality Television, Affect and Intimacy: Reality Matters. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Kavka, Misha. “Industry Convergence Shows: Reality TV and the Leisure Franchise.” Flow TV. Television in the Age of Media Convergence. Eds. Michael Kackman, Marnie Binfield, Matthew Thomas Payne, Allison Perlman and Bryan Sebok. New York: Routledge, 2011. 75-92. Kilborn, Richard. Staging the Real: Factual TV Programming in the Age of Big Brother. Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2003. Lister et al. New Media: A Critical Introduction. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Moens, Marie-Francine, Juanzi Li and Tat-Seng Chua. Mining User Generated Content. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2014. Munar, Ana María. “Digital Exhibitionism: The Age of Exposure.” Culture Unbound 2 (2010): 401-422. Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2001. Roscoe, Jane. “Multi-Platform Event Television: Reconceptualizing our Relationship with Television.” The Communication Review 7.4 (2004): 363-369. Selva, Donatella. “Social Television: Audience and Political Engagement.” Television & New Media 17.2 (2016): 159-173. Tian, Qing and Cynthia A. Hoffner. “Parasocial Interaction With Liked, Neutral, and Disliked Characters on a Popular TV Series.” Mass Communication and Society 13 (2010): 250-269. Tincknell, Estella and Parvati Raghuram. “Big Brother: Reconfiguring the ‘Active’ Audience of Cultural Studies?” Understanding Reality Television. Eds. Su Holmes and Deborah Jermyn. London and New York: Routledge, 2004. 252-269. Van Zoonen, Liesbet. “Desire and Resistance: Big Brother and the Recognition of Everyday Life.” Media, Culture & Society 23.5 (2001): 669-677.
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Media List
CHAPTER TWO “About.” VPRO. No date. 11 May 2016.
CHAPTER THREE “Alles voor de likes?!” VPRO. 5 November 2015. 1 May 2016.
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CHAPTER FOUR Nijhuis, Matijn. “De vijf redenen waarom je moet kijken naar Super Stream Me.” Matijn.nl. 1 September 2015. 23 May 2016.
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Attachment One: Daily Reports
Day 1: We are live! Dag 1: We zijn live! 26 August 2015 It is time! At 11am the stream will begin and Tim and Nicolaas will be LIVE! Reactions of the viewers are starting to come in. They are both very nervous, you can see this at the heartrate measurements, which skyrocket.
Day 2: Hairdresser, dentist, expert and pooping! Dag 2: Kapper, tandarts, ervaringsdeskundige en poepen! 27 August 2015 Tim and Nicolaas survived their first night with the cameras. Day 2 is full of various meetings. Nicolaas pays a visit to the hairdresser and Tim has to write a column. Are they already getting used to the camera? Or are they constantly aware that they are being watched?
Day 3: A confrontation between Tim and Nicolaas Day 3: A confrontatie tussen Tim en Nicolaas 28 August 2015 On the third day of streaming Tim and Nicolaas meet up with their psychologist, do an interview with a vlogger who has 500.000 followers and throw a wild party.
Day 4: Everything to get likes or streaming shamelessly? Dag 4: Alles voor de likes of schaamteloos streamen? 29 August 2015 Today Nicolaas and Tim are hungover. They sleep in, and Tim is the icing on the cake by waking up at 4 pm. But what really wakes Tim up is when he sees parts of his private Whatsapp conversations are published on Twitter.
Day 5: Where are the boundaries? Dag 5: Waar ligt de grens? 30 August 2015
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Today Tim and Nicolaas start their day with not much to do. When they talk about the Whatsapp conversations that appeared on Twitter the day before, Tim loses his temper.
Day 6: Nicolaas is feeling sad Dag 6: Nicolaas voelt zich verdrietig 31 August 2015 Tim has an interview with journalist Els from the VARA television guide. Nicolaas asks if he could join them, but both Tim and Els kindly request him to leave the room.
Day 7: An emotional day Dag 7: Een emotionele dag 1 September 2015 It is an emotional day for the boys. Both of them have an appointment at their psychologist and it causes a lot of stress release.
Day 8: A day on which everybody contradicts himself Dag 8: Een dag waarop iedereen zichzelf tegenspreekt 2 September 2015 It is an eventful day. Tim has to write his column and Nicolaas has an important conversation with his good friend Jan.
Day 9: Afterschool activities Dag 9: Naschoolse activiteiten 3 September 2015 Tim does an interview at the School for Journalism and Nicolaas compares his camera to a chronical disease.
Day 10: Free coffee for Nicolaas and 171 likes for mom Dag 1: Gratis koffie voor Nicolaas en 171 likes voor mama 4 September 2015 Tim starts the day with a vlog to tell the viewers he is hungover. Nicolaas says he wants coffee, but they have seem to run out of it. Thanks to viewer Tom breakfast including a steaming cup of coffee is being delivered.
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Day 11: Never tell your number on TV Dag 11: Noem nooit je nummer op tv 5 September 2015 Tim and Nicolaas start out the day at Zapplive. On the show Nicolaas calls for a ‘Post- Ugly-Selfies-Day’. After all, solely pretty selfies do not provide a realistic image of daily life. On Twitter as well as on Facebook ugly selfies from viewers come pouring in.
Day 12: The day after the after party Dag 12: De dag na de after 6 September 2015 It is the day after the after party. Tim sleeps throughout the entire day and Nicolaas is feeling discouraged by the experiment.
Day 13: An interview with Bits of Freedom Dag 13: Een interview met Bits of Freedom 7 September 2015 The boys have an interview with Hans Zwart at Bits of Freedom.
Day 14: Tim and Nicolaas meet super fan Matijn Dag 14: Tim en Nicolaas ontmoeten superfan Matijn 8 September 2015 Tim as well as Nicolaas cannot wait until the cameras are turned off. They are done.
Day 15: End of the experiment Dag 15: Einde experiment 9 September 2015 Tim finds the camera a burden. In the beginning he thought it was exciting, later he found it normal, but now he is fed up with it.
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Attachment Two: Highlights
Day 1: Tim poops for the first time Dag 1: Tim poept voor het eerst 26 August 2015
Day 1: Tim and Nicolaas discuss the day Dag 1: Tim en Nicolaas bespreken de dag 26 August 2015 Tim and Nicolaas reflect on the first day of streaming. Was it better or worse than expected?
Day 2: Dinner Nicolaas at friend Mas Dag 2: Etentje Nicolaas bij vriendin Mas 27 August 2015 Nicolaas is visiting his good friend/neighbour Mas. Nicolaas is going to be surprised: Maxim Hartman is also there! The conversations during dinner are versatile and deep but after a while all the camera-attention is too much for Mas. The conversations become more emotional and intense by the minute and maybe even too intense for the stream?
Day 2: Interview with Daan Sip Dag 2: Interview met Daan Sip 27 August 2015 Tim and Nicolaas meet Daan Sip, owner of Social1nfluencers, a company that represents 80 YouTube “creators”. Daan Sip knows everything about vloggers and how their viewing numbers can increase.
Day 3: Scoop from famous vlogger Mascha Dag 3: Scoop van bekende vlogger Mascha 28 August 2015 Nicolaas and Tim drink a cup of coffee with Mascha, one of the most well-known
69 vloggers of the Netherlands who shares daily videos about her life on YouTube channel Vloggloss. They have a conversation about how real vlogs actually are.
Day 3: A confrontation between Tim and Nicolaas Dag 3: Een confrontatie tussen Tim en Nicolaas 28 August 2015
Day 5: Does Nicolaas still have the right to privacy? Dag 5: Heeft Nicolaas nog recht op privacy? 30 August 2015 A Super Stream Me viewer sees Nicolaas streaming in the street and decides to film him. Nicolaas is on to him and together they talk about privacy and social media.
Day 5: Mother Tim discovers via the stream that he smokes Dag 5: Moeder Tim ontdekt via stream dat hij rookt 30 August 2015
Day 6: Tim meets a fan Dag 6: Tim ontmoet een fan 31 August 2015 Tim meets a fan! Very exciting, even though everybody is confused.
Day 6: Nicolaas is getting in over his head Dag 6: Nicolaas wordt het allemaal even te veel 31 August 2015 This morning the experiment became too much for Nicolaas. Fortunately his boyfriend is watching the stream exactly at that moment and he decides to encourage him.
Day 7: Nicolaas has a breakthrough at the therapist Dag 7: Nicolaas krijgt inzicht bij therapeut 1 September 2015 Nicolaas blows off some steam at his therapist and gains some refreshing insights.
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Day 7: How do Tim and Nicolaas feel about the experiment now? Dag 7: Hoe kijken Tim en Nicolaas nu tegen het experiment aan? 1 September 2015 Tim and Nicolaas go out for burgers together on the seventh day. They discuss how they feel about the experiment at this moment.
Day 8: Tim and Nicolaas on self-censorship Dag 8: Tim en Nicolaas over zelfcensuur 2 September 2015 Tim and Nicolaas have a moment of reflection and discover they are hardly able to gossip any more. How much self-censorship do they have?
Day 8: Friend Jan on Nicolaas’ phone use Dag 8: Vriend Jan over Nicolaas z’n telefoongebruik 2 September 2015 Good friend Jan calls Nicolaas to meet with him. He thinks Nicolaas is too much into himself and his phone. “You’re letting all these distractions disrupt the present time.”
Day 10: Tim on masturbating in the stream Dag 10: Tim over masturberen in de stream 4 September 2015 Tim encounters the limitations of the project. “I will never get over it man! It will exist forever.”
Day 10: Nicolaas visiting his mother Connie Dag 10: Nicolaas op bezoek bij moeder Connie 4 September 2015 A talk from mother to son. Around the table with Connie, her partner and Nicolaas.
Day 10: A get-together with Frans Bauer Dag 10: Onderonsje met Frans Bauer 4 September 2015
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Frans Bauer once had his own reality show. How did he experience it? Nicolaas meets him behind the scenes of RTL Late Night.
Day 11: Tim does something very stupid Dag 11: Tim doet iets heel doms 5 September 2015 Tim has done something very stupid. Something with saying your telephone number on television.
Day 11: Valtifest Dag 11: Valtifest 5 September 2015 They gave it their all! Watch images of Tim and Nicolaas at Valtifest here.
Day 14: Visiting super fan Matijn Dag 14: Op bezoek bij superfan Matijn 8 September 2015 Tim and Nicolaas visit Matijn, a viewer who watches the stream for about 10 hours a day. Then Nicolaas discovers something…
Day 15: Tim is done Dag 15: Tim heeft het gehad 9 September 2015 Day 15. The cliché is true: the last mile is the longest. Tim den Besten disposes his camera. It looks like Super Stream Me has come to an end.
Day 16: End of the experiment Dag 16: Einde experiment 10 September 2015 Tim and Nicolaas have a last conversation about the experiment before they pull the plug. “It is done,” Nicolaas tells the viewers. “I hope you all felt a little dirty at some point.”
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