Literary and Linguistic Computing Advance Access originally published online on March 3, 2006
Literary and Linguistic Computing 2006 21(Supplement 1):67-75; doi:10.1093/llc/fql003
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Streaming Video Theory
Department of English, University of Toronto, Canada
Correspondence: Susan Hesemeier, Department of English, University of Toronto, 7 King's College Circle, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M5S 3K1. E-mail: s.hesemeier{at}utoronto.ca
Streaming video is being employed in ways that differ from its surrounding media, such as film, television, literature, and the visual arts. Its properties allow users to broadcast personal space, through web-cams and the Internet, to a large audience that can ‘see in’, though the subject cannot ‘see out’ to people viewing their personal space. The use of web-cams to project personal space is a phenomenon that can be studied in relation to Foucault's discussion of the ‘Panopticon’—as an ordering system of surveillance, and the web-cam as a resistance to systems of control in the non-virtual (i.e. ‘real-world’) environment. To understand the web-cam aspect of streaming video as an act of resistance is to place streaming video within its psychological context, an important factor when beginning to situate a new medium within a theoretical context. Also important is streaming video's context within postmodernism—within a fixation on our own reflections and the image-without-original. This article addresses the above issues, and concludes that the use of streaming video through the web-cam is an act of resistance within an environment that is a perfectly segregating and controlling system disguised as a ‘festival’, in which prescribed rules and structures can appear to be resisted when in fact they are only pacification mechanisms within the controlling structure of the computer and network.