Binge-watching can’t even be considered a guilty pleasure because we know for damn sure that everyone does it.
Over 9 out of 10 people, in fact.
There is an infinite supply of articles that talk about the societal phenomena surrounding television and watching a helluva lot of it. We could probably make a generator that would spit out these suggested topics to make all of our lives easier — but that’s beside the point.
If you’re looking to understand why we spend an entire weekend watching Master of None, most of what you’ll find boils down to something to do with technology. The reason is usually at some cross-section between an increase in quality content meeting an increase in quantity of content meeting the accessibility of said content. Supply pushing demand!
However, technology can only facilitate change to a point. Somewhere along the line the things technology allows us to do become routine, becoming reinforced by behaviour rather than the technology that started it.
Binge-watching didn’t start with Netflix.
Does anyone remember DVDs? No? Well, streaming sites weren’t the first option for having a lot of similar content in one accessible place, believe it or not.
I am proud to say that I, like many others that for some reason didn’t grow up on cartoons, have the complete DVD box-set of Friends. All 90-something hours of it. And I definitely watched entire seasons over the course of a day or two back when DVDs were still a thing.
Even though it already existed, nobody really gave a shit about “binge-watching” until the Netflix-era.
Whatever the history, the fact is that the concept is widespread now, to the point of people taking pride to the point of romanticizing the fact that we lounge around and rot for several hours at a time.
And it’s not just television. You can binge anything, really, most notably binge-drink, with it’s (understandably) negative connotations, with the connotations around the word “binge” being flipped.
Take binge-reading, which has an interesting connection to binge-watching because of the historical belief that readers are more sophisticated than watchers — especially when it comes to shows based off of a book.
So why do we binge content?
People are self-centered assholes (or: you are what you watch.)
Sometimes. We all are! Don’t even try to deny it.
Like everything else we consume, we choose our products (in this case, television shows) to identify with and define ourselves as unique individuals. This concept of our “extended self” has been around for a while, and continues to apply with television consumption in the current era.
With the mass amount of basically free television content available, people suddenly have the ability to define themselves through which shows they watch and how quickly they do so.
Think of two people who respectively like two opposing sports teams, and they’re arguing about which team is better. Try that, but with Breaking Bad vs Orange is the New Black.
People define themselves as not only enjoying television, but enjoying it to the point of masochism.
We binge-watch to be better than others.
Because television is a strong part of our society and daily interactions, you have to be in-the-know of popular shows or you’re an outsider.
“You don’t watch Game of Thrones?!” — something that every person who has watched Game of Thrones has said at some point or another.
Admittedly, this is why I watched Season 3 of Orange is the New Black, Season 1 of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and Season 1 of Master of None each over the span of a couple days.
I felt left out not watching them, as I currently do with Narcos, Sense8, and an easy dozen more.
The more we watch a show, the more information we have about it, and the more we can contribute to or control conversations about said television show. Binge-watchers gain Expert Power in a field where streaming sites have given everybody Information Power.
Simply put: it feels good to know more about shows that people are watching.
Go back to our previous comparison. We have two people who “like” Breaking Bad, but one person is so much of a fan that they watched all 5 seasons back-to-back, making themselves the “bigger fan”, and they can inform the other person about all of the Easter eggs that they “probably missed”.
You’ve definitely met someone like this.
I’m not saying this is a conscious thing we are doing. I truly believe that we are spending our time watching shows because we enjoy them.
But this isn’t completely the case, given the ideas of purge-watching and hate-watching — respectively, watching shows because we feel obligated to complete them or because they’re so bad that they’re good.
If anything, these concepts prove that we use our watching habits to shape and portray who we are.
Binge-watching is an incredible phenomenon as so few things can so strongly unite people to both their products and to others. It impacts our lives for good and for bad, from how it’s linked to loneliness and depression, to how it impacts our productivity, to how it helps our marriages.
So the next time you painfully reach for the remote to press “Continue Watching” as you question your life choices in a sea of blankets and take-out containers, try to also think about why you’re binge-watching in the first place.
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