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Abstract During the digital era, online videos, which are represented by short videos and online live streaming, have increasingly become one of the main media for contemporary leisure activities, thus growing into a frontier topic in the leisure studies. Serving as the leisure space for multi-subject interactions and virtual reality integrations, online videos seem to have fulfilled people’s social and leisure needs, continuously creating a new world of leisure life. This can be elaborated on with three logical dimensions: “individual leisure life”, “virtual leisure community”, and “meaning world of life”. Firstly, online videos construct an interactive space combining virtual and real elements, providing individuals with novel leisure experiences, expanding their spiritual horizons, and revealing new possibilities and dimensions for individual leisure development under the logic of “technology-capital”, thereby offering new opportunities for multi-dimensional personal growth. Secondly, individuals can immerse themselves in the diverse digital leisure communities through online videos, continuously creating daily aesthetic homes of leisure activities, enabling people to acquire richer sensory integration experiences and meaningful aesthetic experiences, cognitive patterns, social cognition, and value concepts. Thirdly, from the perspective of the meaning world of leisure life, online videos open up new ways to construct a “simulated world”, providing a new domain and interactive mode for free expressions, mutual communications, and social participations, endowing leisure life with new freedom and potential for integrated development, showcasing a vision of “holistic leisure”, and enabling life meaning to be clarified and liberated poetically through new technological means. At the same time, under the governance of power, capital, and technology, the creation and consumption of online video leisure products may tend toward alienation. Online videos blur the boundaries between labor and leisure, posing the risk of individuals becoming digital laborers while sharing digital leisure experiences; virtual leisure communities may also be changed into “information cocoons” due to the technological scaffolding, becoming prisons that confine leisure activities; ethical misconduct and even illegal activities such as cyber violence, video fraud, and rumor propagation are rampant in the virtual world, leading to the possibility of the meaning world and habitat gradually going barren, and individuals may become one-dimensional, thus creating a leisure landscape full of contradictory tensions from individuals to communities and then to the meaning world. We should focus on the new era of digital life where digital technology and leisure intersect, virtual and real intertwine, and individuals and others coexist, strive to maintain a clear subjective consciousness, recognize the complexity of digital technology and the risk of digital leisure alienation, continuously explore its positive value, and construct a better new world of leisure life. In conclusion, to have an in-depth exploration of this novel social leisure phenomenon, i.e., online video leisure, and to obtain a comprehensive analysis of the constructions and challenges of online videos to leisure life, require not only reasonable interpretations and innovative applications of several important leisure theories, but also innovative analysis of typical cases; only in this way can we continuously broaden and enhance our understanding of the relationship between digital technology and leisure activities, and provide inspirations for the future research and practical applications in digital leisure, even showcasing new research ideas for leisure studies, technical philosophy, and technical sociology.
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Published: 02 July 2024
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