This informative article analyzes the political economic climate of intimately affective data regarding Chinese gay matchmaking system Blued.
The institutionalization, professionalization, and datafication of performative labor
By contracting official streamers and outsourcing contracting, Blued provides structured streamer recruitment and administration. It has triggered three interrelated improvements: the professionalization, institutionalization, and datafication of performative labor. First, Blued’s bonus gifts system provides reconfigured homosexual real time streamers into a labor force that’s semi-amateur and semi-professional. Next, an upswing of mobile real time streaming is combined with an emerging kind business, gonghui, which optimizes the alive streamer work sequence. A gonghui features as an online department that teaches normal people to become pro streamers. […]