In these hours you have probably happened to find yourself in front of the news of a local in Milan, the Crazy Cat Cafè, flooded with negative reviews due to a decidedly unpleasant encounter with a Twitch streamer, such Gabbrone. If not, here is a brief summary of the situation.
What does IRL mean
Among the many types of direct that you can do on Twitch there are also the so-called IRLs, or In Real Life. These are usually times when the streamer broadcasts directly from your phone while strolling around the city or visit a particular place. So far there would be nothing wrong, but a sub-category of this kind of streaming was born with the express purpose of disturbing those around by exploiting the contribution of the public. Why this makes Twitch broadcasts more interesting and fascinating than a YouTube video lies in the live stream, in the unexpected, in the content created together with those who follow you.
In fact, if you want it is possible to make a chat message is read aloud from a speech synthesizer, upon payment of a small donation to the streamer. It is therefore easy to imagine the scene and the consequences of a boy who enters a room accompanied by a forest of curses and annoying noises of various kinds that come out of the phone. That’s exactly what happened at the Crazy Cat Cafè in Milan, plus the streamer fans who first started calling the club to raise the level of the joke and then started leaving negative reviews to “punish” the owners, guilty of having hunted their darling. Among these opinions with a star you could read things like “In the club moreover there are feminists and LGBTQ people” this to understand the average tone of the debate.
The event itself is obviously something of little consequence, it is the umpteenth and inevitable childhood drift that tomorrow will already be old stuff of a tool that can be used to comment live a mission to Mars, listen to a girl in a bikini whispering into a microphone, admire the deeds of a particularly good player or take a charity marathon. However, it is also an example of the mechanisms that are now automatically engaged within some communities on Twitch, but also outside, and on which the platform should clarify or be able to respond more precisely.
network phenomena
Cats have taken over the internet, but we have forgotten it
by Diletta Parlangeli
The responsibility that is not there
After the events of the Crazy Cat Cafè, in fact, the streamer has adopted the typical protocol of deresponsibilization that is triggered in these cases. He distanced himself from what had happened, he dissociated himself, he sought support within friendly spaces to expose his reasons in a “soft” contradictory, he lashed out against those who would have used the event to advertise and so on. The fault always lies with others.
It is undoubtedly true that the worst acts of disturbance have come from the public and that the public was not encouraged to do so, but it’s also true that everything went exactly the way it was supposed to and both the streamer and his fans were aware of it because it was exactly the kind of reaction you were looking for. Widening the field of analysis a little, the mechanism is not very different from that of any “shitstorm”, that is the storms of insults that come those who allow themselves to touch anyone with a decent following on social media. The same mechanism with which Salvini publishes a photo of any protesters, accompanied by phrases such as “What do we tell him?”.
Dissociating oneself, arguing that they are only small parts of one’s community are screens behind which hides those who know very well who their following is made up of, a following that is pampered and nurtured with content that must be increasingly extreme, so capitalize on the attention (and the money). The live broadcast from Crazy Cat Cafe is part of a very specific format, not a situation that got out of hand Gabbrone, as the streamer is called, and it’s not even his problem alone, given that the web is full of this type of content and when he stops, another one will arrive.
This is what happens when tools come into your hand without you having them the awareness of using them to the fullest, which is one of the biggest problems of the internet when it arrived on our smartphones and spread through social networks.
If we wanted to be particularly indulgent we could say that Gabbrone simply had the misfortune of finding himself at 19 with a tool capable of making him make mistakes in public very quickly and show us what that age often has in mind: girls, desire to mess and various bombers. Each of us has been or has known people like that, but before at least they were annoying only in the confines of the classroom or neighborhood.
Jokes of dubious taste
We are faced with the steroid version of the phone pranks and other antics that kids have always done. But the point is that those who were once boys (and kids also have the right to be stupid, reckless and superficial) today they are people with an audience made up of hundreds of their peers, an audience of which they seem to have no awareness, except when they count the money from donations or some short-sighted brand. call to sponsor a product. Then when something bad happens here are the “I disassociate”, the appeals against censorship and the dictatorship of the politically correct.
Twitch is currently experiencing a phase of profound transformation. There pandemic has accelerated certain processes that have led the famous platform for streaming video games to have an increasingly large container in which realities of many types coexist and often for to emerge on the mass there is the temptation to play to the limit of the regulation and this can be done in many ways. If you want, you can report your stream as unsuitable for minors, but even in this case we are talking about an easily bypassed screen.
Recently the debate has focused a lot on the issue of direct in inflatable pools made by girls in bathing suits or content that touches soft porn with moans into the microphone and provocative poses. There was talk of decency, of embarrassment to share the platform with certain shows and, rightly so, also of rules of conduct and exposure of minors. Comments that usually, you don’t know why, don’t pop up when there’s a guy involved tries to get kicked out by a local, who harasses girls on the street and who in general adopts behaviors that are not exactly educational. It almost seems that a woman in costume annoys more than a character capable of damaging a commercial activity on a whim and fueling diseducational behaviors in younger people. I wonder why.
Legal or illegal?
And while Twitch is pretty clear on explicit content in its regulation only to take unclear measures, it is much less so about what happened in Milan, which today represents a gray area that is difficult to pigeonhole, punishable and detectable, much less than music protected by copyright. There, thanks to the algorithms that detect them, the pulling of the ears arrives without mercy. This is because I fund what happened is not illegal, or at least it would be difficult to put together a cause on it, it’s just childish. The problem is the consequences, which were widely imaginable.
Perhaps the time has come to seek responsibility. On the one hand, Gabbrone and others should be responsible for what their respective communities can, and are instigated to do, on the other hand, however, the first ones responsible are the platforms: Facebook, YouTube, Twitch they are not without fault, because over the top content, drama and controversy are the strongest currency, more than any constructive discussion. If aggressive, childish and controversial content is successful it is only because the system rewards it as the easiest way to get attention. Here it is Gabbrone goes to bars to get kicked out, here Pillon feeds the algorithm with indignant comments and manages to reach more and more people. And if someone attacks you, there are always those who are willing to defend you by filling a place with negative reviews. Fortunately, the story ends it worked out well for the Crazy Cat Cafe, which now has many more followers and is full of positive reviews, while the negative ones have been gradually deleted. Meanwhile, Gabbrone has been banned from Twitch (but for how long?).
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