Watching Other People Work: Documenting and Streaming Labor on TikTok LIVE

Celeste Oon and Jessica Maddox, "Watching Other People Work: Documenting and Streaming Labor on TikTok LIVE." Paper accepted to the 2026 Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference, Chicago, Illinois, March 2026. Abstract: From the factory production line to the street food stand, workers across the world are turning to livestreaming as a side hustle to maximize profits in an economically precarious environment. By broadcasting themselves at their day jobs, workers simultaneously labor for both their primary jobs and social media platforms, pointing to “rapid capitalization” and “a double process of individualization” under neoliberal conditions. As a result, traditional labor is transformed into digital entertainment. As the employment landscape shifts, less is known about contemporary conditions of work, power, and identity. This paper is thus informed by over 200 worker livestreams. Through critical technocultural discourse analysis, we examined the relationship between recurring themes, worker identities, and employment locations, and how these elements manifest via TikTok LIVE. We present three main points: visualizing labor, which bolsters omnipresent surveillance and lays bare power imbalances; affecting labor, which highlights social dynamics and interpersonal gratitude; and slowing and speeding labor, which problematize (a)synchronous online content creation and platform desires for presentism.