Binge-Watching as a Social Practice

The final session at IAMCR 2019 for today starts with George Anghelcev, whose focus is on binge-watching. There has been a major shift over the last decade in how audiences view serialised video content, from being constrained to the regular timeslots for TV series to on-demand viewing of multiple episodes in single sittings. Some three quarters of U.S. TV consumers now binge-watch, and the numbers continue to rise – contrary to earlier news coverage, this is not a minority practice.

This is in part also because media narratives now portray binge-watching as a normal, ordinary, and widespread behaviour; however, differences between heavy, regular, and non-binge-watchers still exist and can be analysed. Binge-watching here tends to be defined by the number of episodes watched in a single sitting, the duration of a sitting, or a combination of both. For the purposes of the present study (of U.S. college students), binge-watching is defined as watching three or more episode in a single sitting, and heavy binge-watchers do so more than four times a week.

The study found that there was no difference in sociability or social engagement between heavy, regular, and non-binge-watchers; binge-watching can itself be a social practice or enable cultural inclusion through social relatedness – indeed, heavy binge-watchers spend more time per day on social engagement than the other groups, and can become experts in the domain of cultural consumption, and opinion leaders for their social environment on what shows to watch.

Heavy binge-watchers are therefore also experiencing a fear of missing out more strongly – as opinion leaders, they have more social status to lose if they no longer engage strongly with television content. This can also have some negative impacts on personal life, however – including a loss of sleep, for instance.

This means that moral panics about this practice as antisocial should be viewed with considerable scepticism; heavy binge-watching is socially motivated at least in part.