Has livestreaming gone too far? How to cope with the video revolution

Lindsay Holding of Minneapolis is planning to broadcast the birth of her second child over the internet. Friends and family will be able to watch and comment throughout the labor process. “Yes, I’m a crazy person, and I’m going to livestream my son’s birth,” the 33-year-old said.

Live video is quickly becoming an enticing way for people to share and, some would say, overshare their lives online.

“It’s a powerful way to communicate because there’s no way to know what is going to happen next or whether something might go wrong,” said Shayla Stern, senior digital strategist at Fast Horse, a Minneapolis marketing agency. “You can’t look away from a compelling live video.”

With new, easy-to-use platforms and apps, a recent crop of livestreaming videos is shining a spotlight on the positive and negative realities of real-time video technology.

Recently, “Chewbacca Mom” got her 15 minutes of fame after hundreds of thousands of people shared the feel-good Facebook Live video of her laughing hysterically while wearing a plastic Wookiee mask. Less funny – at least to his wife – was when a California man accidentally broadcast the birth of his son on Facebook. And a week earlier, strangers watched in helpless horror as a 19-year-old French woman used Periscope, a live video streaming app, to broadcast her suicide.

Although livestreaming video isn’t new, the addition of Facebook Live has launched it into the mainstream. Now anyone with a smartphone has the ability to turn the camera on themselves and post real-time video.

This new human experience is raising a lot of questions about privacy, ethics and intimacy online. Many are asking: “Just because we can livestream, does it mean we should?”

Holding admits that some of her friends and family think she’s crazy for livestreaming a birth, but she insists, “It’s not a big deal.”

“Whoever is going to be watching are going to be people I love, and I want them to be there with me,” she said. “As technology becomes a bigger part of our lives, things like this will be less of a big deal.”

Livestreaming gives viewers a chance to be a fly on the wall at events they would traditionally need an invitation to.

Tens of thousands of people recently watched on Facebook, in real time, as comedian Ricky Gervais took a bath. BuzzFeed livestreamed the skin-tightening surgery of a man who lost 270 pounds, and more than 800,000 people watched when a watermelon exploded under the pressure of more than 700 rubber bands wrapped around its center.

Unusual? Sure, but experts say these are exactly the kind of live videos that are hard to look away from.

“Livestreaming allows audiences to feel that they are experiencing events live and unfiltered, in front of their eyes,” said Valerie Belair-Gagnon, an incoming assistant professor at the University of Minnesota, who will teach a class on new media and culture. “It is also powerful because it has the potential to reach certain groups of people with specific interests, share content and interact with each other.”

Other recent livestreamed events have allowed viewers to virtually swim with sharks, watch movies with Shia LaBeouf and watch Mark Zuckerberg’s live interactive Q&A with NASA astronauts in space.

“You no longer have to experience the event by going somewhere,” said Greg Swan, vice president of public relations and emerging media at Minneapolis digital ad agency Space 150.

Guests have been able to virtually attend weddings, funerals, church services and graduations for years, but advances in technology are making it easier than ever.

Naomi Hoffman projected her cousin’s wedding onto her TV and her husband’s grandmother came over to watch. Hoffman, a St. Louis Park mother of two, also often uses FaceTime to virtually have dinner with her husband, who works long hours as a doctor.

“It doesn’t replace being in a room with somebody,” she said. “But it’s the next best thing.”

It’s clear there are many questions about the ethical issues around privacy, safety and intellectual property with livestreamed video. For example, fans can livestream the Twins game and the Kenny Chesney concert – but should they?

“We should be talking about what is fair game for livestreaming,” Fast Horse’s Stern said. “There are a lot of ethical – and potentially legal – ramifications to livestreaming events that one person perceives to be private and another sees as public. We’ve been struggling with this issue in terms of the photos we post to social media, but live video complicates it even further.”

This story was originally published June 21, 2016 at 8:01 AM with the headline "Has livestreaming gone too far? How to cope with the video revolution."