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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 12 April 2025
What kind of time do we experience when we wait? When we wait for someone to turn up to a video call, time feels like an interlude; when we wait for our Facebook News Feed to load, time feels like a clot in our throat as the buffering icon keeps on spinning. In waiting, we realize that there is a multitude to temporalities: time can be standardized so people can be in the same place at the same time, but time also dwells inside each of us – in the consciousness of our finite lifetime and in the rhythms of our body. Technology has been said to accelerate time and contract duration (Hassan, 2011; Wajcman, 2015); what, then, of waiting with technology? Technology has not made waiting redundant, but it seems to have transformed waiting substantially. When we reach for our phone as we wait, with or without a direction, waiting is given shape outside of our own body. When we wait on or with our phone, however, waiting re-emerges as viscerally within.
Liveness captures some of these entangled dynamics of waiting in the presence of technology. Certain temporal arrangements are to be made for liveness to be enacted: someone to ‘go live’, someone to ‘watch live’, something to be happening ‘live’, some technologies to faithfully carry out ‘the live’. Radio is thought of as a live medium (Vianello, 1985), broadcast television is live insofar as it competes with the new viewing platforms and business models such as Netflix and Hulu (van Es, 2017), ‘digital liveness’ has been understood as ‘our conscious act of grasping virtual entities as live in response to the claims they make on us’ (Auslander, 2012, p 10). Liveness temporality is multiple and contingent on its medium; the ‘paradox of liveness’ lies in its apparent constructedness and its seeming claim to provide direct access to the event relayed (van Es, 2017). There is a similar paradox to the temporality of waiting: waiting is an enactment of particular bodily and extra-bodily temporalities, but waiting is also time temporalizing through the body.
In the sections that follow, I explore what it means when people engage in liveness as a way to overcome waiting – to recalibrate downtime. I begin by outlining the paradox of liveness as algorithmic and liveness as lived by reviewing current disparate literatures.
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