The Role of Media Synchronicity Fit and Sense of Community in Live Streaming Platforms

To understand viewers’ sense of community in the live streaming environment, this research synthesizes media synchronicity theory and sense of community theory to develop a theoretical framework. We aim to examine the antecedents and consequences of the sense of community in live streaming platforms. We expect that viewers’ actual communication purpose (e.g., conveyance or convergence) will influence viewers\u27 sense of community in the live streaming context and further impact their activities in traditional third-party online communities. We first use experiments to validate the mechanism in our theoretical model and then collect observational data from Twitch, a popular live streaming platform, to test our hypotheses. Our results will provide theoretical contributions to the live streaming, online community, and communication literature. Our findings will provide practical implications for streamers in the live streaming platform