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Politiques du lore

How do personal and collective experiences with live streaming contribute to the formation of political sensibilities?

How do online communities come to share common ways of following the news, interpreting political events, and positioning themselves in relation to the social world? The Lore Politics project examines the forms of politicization that emerge on live-streaming platforms, particularly Twitch, based on interactions among streamers, chat rooms, and other spaces. It focuses on what might be called a community’s “lore”: a body of references, narratives, jokes, memories, and perspectives that are built up over time and give meaning to current events. By observing these digital social dynamics, the project seeks to understand how the diverse audiences of live streaming stay informed, how they discuss public affairs, and how diffuse political sensibilities form, often at the intersection of information, entertainment, and online life.

Research

Lore politics is a research activity devoted to ordinary forms of politicization in digital environments, based on an investigation of francophone live streaming communities, primarily on Twitch. It examines how audiences who consume this type of media follow current affairs, interpret political events, and construct common reference points within spaces where information, entertainment, and online social life intermingle.

The term lore here refers to the set of shared knowledge, memories, networks of references, modes of communication, and habits of interpretation that are built over time through contact with the “communities” associated with content creators and their productions. Borrowed from video game cultures and recent work on internet cultures, the notion of lore makes it possible to grasp the specific way in which these “communities” produce their own reference points for understanding what happens to them, what they watch, and what they judge to be important. Platforms and their formats play a decisive role in this dynamic: they condition the way experience is lived, remembered, revisited, and transformed. Studying the politics of lore therefore means asking how common frameworks of interpretation are produced through the prism of the participatory viewing formats of live streaming, how these frameworks circulate between Twitch, Discord, YouTube, X, or TikTok, and how they contribute to making certain public issues more visible, more salient, or more debatable than others—in short, to producing frameworks of perception and action with regard to the social and political world.

A collective inquiry

This research is part of a pragmatist tradition that seeks to stand alongside those involved rather than to analyze their actions from a detached, overarching perspective. It therefore aims both to co-produce descriptions of live-streaming communities and to establish with them a space for shared reflection on the roles our digital practices play in our paths of socialization and politicization. To achieve this, it relies on several complementary activities: the development and sharing of digital tools, the creation of mixed research methods and collective research formats, and a series of upcoming meetings with scholars working on shared issues, in an experimental online seminar format.