Can’t wait to feel better: Facebook Live and the recalibration of downtime in tending to the body

Abstract

This article explores the temporality of liveness on Facebook Live through the analytical lens of downtime. Downtime is conceptualized here as multiscale: downtime exists in between the micro action and inaction of everyday life, but also in larger episodes of personal and health crises that reorient the body toward technologies for instantaneous replenishment of meaning and activity. Living through downtime with mobile technology enables the experience of oscillation between liveness as simultaneity and liveness as instantaneity. By juxtaposing time-as-algorithmic against time-as-lived through the livestreaming practices of diện chẩn, an emergent unregulated therapeutic method, I show how different enactments of liveness on Facebook Live recalibrate downtime so that the body can reconfigure its being-in-time. The temporal reverberation of downtime and liveness creates an alternative temporal space wherein social practices that are shunned by the temporal structures of institution and society can retune and continue to thrive at the margin of these structures and at the central of the everyday.

The Meanings of Social Media Use in Everyday Life: Filling Empty Slots, Everyday Transformations, and Mood Management

“…Dimmick et al (2011) have identified this kind of temporality in relation to news use in digital media, which, they argue, is conducted in the interstices of time. Nguyen (2021) has underlined similar findings in relation to Facebook Live, which he claims is used in smaller and larger "down times," that is, times while people are recovering from mental unhealth. In these states people use Facebook live to regain strength to come back to the general flow of everyday life and social media (here Facebook) is hence used to fill empty slots in time, but also to recover strength, while awaiting life to start again.…”

“…In an ethnographic study of the impact of Facebook on the lives of ordinary people in Trinidad, Miller (2011), similarly, underlines geocultural context as key to understanding social media use; an aspect that has been explored further in comparative ethnographies (Costa, 2018; Miller et al, 2016). Facebook, in particular, has also gained specific interest among scholars, where, for instance, its temporal dimensions for specific groups have been explored (Bucher, 2020; Costa, 2018; Kaun & Stiernstedt, 2014; Nguyen, 2021), as well as news use in social media (see, for example, Dimmick et al, 2011). Yet, empirical research on social media in everyday life remains relatively scarce, especially when it comes to less explicitly engaged or political forms of social media use.…”

Network Life of Non-biomedical Knowledge

“…The adoption and domestication of livestreaming technologies on Facebook among emergent non-biomedical therapeutic practices also create alternative temporal spaces for them to thrive at the margin of scientific biomedical practices and at the centre of everyday life (Nguyen 2021b).…”