KEHADIRAN SOSIAL DALAM DUNIA DIGITAL (STUDI ETNOGRAFI VIRTUAL PADA INTERAKSI AUDIENS LIVE STREAMING MARAPTHON SEASON 3)
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.23969/jp.v11i03.59068Keywords:
Social Presence, Live Streaming, Virtual Ethnography, Parasocial Interaction, Digital CommunityAbstract
This study examines the problem of how social presence is constructed within the digital space of a 100-day continuous live streaming event, Marapthon Season 3: The Last Tale, hosted by Indonesian content creator Reza Arap on YouTube. The phenomenon attracted global attention, reaching the top position worldwide in live viewer rankings, yet academic understanding of how audiences experience and construct social presence in such an extreme-duration digital broadcast remains limited. This research aims to describe in depth the essence of audience awareness and meaning-making regarding social presence in the digital world created during the Marapthon live streaming experience. Employing a virtual ethnography approach based on Christine Hine's methodology, this study conducted cyber observation through screen recording and screenshots of the YouTube live chat column, complemented by offline Focus Group Discussion (FGD) with six highly engaged audience participants selected through purposive sampling. The findings reveal that audience interaction was autonomously formed through adaptive textual and symbolic expressions, including community-specific inside jokes, emoji manipulation as social control instruments, and horizontal communication norms. Social presence manifested multidimensionally through the blurring of creator private space and audience domestic space, fostering parasocial relationships resembling real-world friendships. Furthermore, audiences exercised collective financial agency through the donathon mechanism to control broadcast duration and sustain the virtual third place. Critically, Marapthon reconstructed traditional social gathering practices into an inclusive virtual third place that mitigated modern social isolation, while simultaneously operating within a commodification structure of time and creator capitalism.
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