Abstract
What is the meaning of live? Until now, the answers to this question have usually been confined to broadcast media, and particularly to television, and to concerts actually occurring as one views them, the key difference in both cases being recording, pre-recorded programmes and phonograph records. Recent developments have rendered such answers inadequate, in need of both supplementation and reconceptualisation. That is the purpose of this book. Karin van Es argues that three main perspectives on liveness have hitherto prevailed: as ontology, as phenomenology (located in the audience) and as rhetoric. She proposes an alternative, one that combines all three perspectives and in so doing generates a conception she calls constellations of liveness. This brings together technology, users and institutions and allows us to consider the dynamic interactions and tensions between them in relation to liveness. The concept of live also needs rethinking in light of changes in the media landscape, particularly with the advent of social media. The book is based upon four case studies which are used to explore varying constellations of liveness: Livestream, the online music-collaboration platform eJamming, The Voice and Facebook. It provides a valuable revisiting of what lives means, what it entails today and under what conditions it comes into being. In these ways, it offers a significant contribution to thinking about how the media landscape has changed and is changing, and how the relationships between different media may develop in the future.