Periscope: dipping in and out of people’s lives

While the immediacy of online interaction is familiar to those of us who use social media – and second nature to a generation brought up with platforms like Snapchat, FaceTime and YouNow – watching a live video feed via your phone screen is an intimacy that takes a bit of getting used to. Add in the fact that viewers can type comments directly into a Periscope stream, which the broadcaster can react to in near real time, and it becomes a uniquely connected experience. Using the app’s map feature, which shows every ‘scope being broadcast at that particular moment, users can scroll across the world and decide where they want to go. Aside from the location, a user name and a subject-line to each broadcast, viewers generally enter into a new live stream not really knowing what to expect.