The Organization of Live Stream Beginnings

This study offers the first empirical examination of how live stream beginnings are organized, revealing recurring interactional practices across two genres: “streamer-centered” and “event-centered” streams. By analyzing a corpus of live streams on Twitter from the perspective of ethnomethodology and conversation analysis, our findings reveal that in streamer-centered streams, streamers address four key concerns: gathering an audience, managing the audience collectively, engaging individually with viewers, and enabling stream intelligibility. In event-centered streams, streamers adopt a minimal presence, acting as observers documenting events while viewers show strong orientations to the immediate intelligibility of content. In addition, greetings remain pervasive throughout the streams, reflecting interactional expectations shaped by participation frameworks and categorical relevancies. These findings shed light on the interactional organization that underpins live stream beginnings. Data are in English.