Everyone on Periscope Is Livestreaming Loneliness

If a tree falls in a forest, and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Tre Vayne
OneZero
Published in
6 min readMar 30, 2020

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A photo of a woman with an illuminated transparent ball in a dark room.
Photo: Dalia Franco/EyeEm/Getty Images

SSelf-isolating due to the growing concerns about the current Covid-19 outbreak has led some to pick up a new hobby, try their most ambitious baking project, or catch up on their watch lists. But the mix of free time and internet access has led me down the rabbit hole of livestreaming, quasi-connections, and our collective loneliness.

It started as I was lazily browsing the app store for anything that might keep my attention for more than 10 seconds. I went through apps I used to have downloaded on my phone and saw one that was so buried in my memory that I mistook it for a game and decided to try it out again. However the app wasn’t a mobile game, it was Periscope, a live video streaming service that launched in 2015. The concept was simple yet revolutionary — Periscope gives users the opportunity to broadcast whatever they’re doing, wherever they are. Even though the concept of “going live” seems commonplace now, Periscope (and the others that came before it) were ahead of the curve in envisioning what live broadcasts can do for social media (live stories for Instagram and Facebook weren’t completely rolled out until late 2016).

But for some reason, Periscope or even parent company Twitter aren’t top of mind when it comes to live broadcasts. While livestreaming was becoming more popular on other platforms such as Twitch, YouNow, and Instagram, Periscope faded out of my consciousness. However Periscope is not dead, and for a small cohort of people, it’s more than a simple platform. It’s the last campfire in the night.

It is unbelievably difficult not to get sucked into some of these livestreams. I’ll find myself cycling through my typical repertoire of apps at warp speed and then all of a sudden, I’m watching a trucker racing from Indiana to Ohio as he sings country classics for an hour and a half. While a good number of streams are Little League baseball games and truckers on long voyages, it doesn’t take long to discover that Periscope is a cornucopia of eccentric characters.

I found myself getting caught up in the lives of people all around the world. The first person I watched was a young woman in…

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Tre Vayne
OneZero

I am a writer, content creator, and comedian based in Los Angeles. Big fan of food, philosophy, and reality TV.