Entertaining indulgence

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Bingeing isn’t typically seen as a good thing. Excessive indulgence, particularly of food and drink, is usually frowned
upon, while medical professionals will tell you how unhealthy it is.

But ‘bingeing’ is now being used to describe an altogether different sort of behaviour – that of watching TV episodes and seasons back-to-back through online streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime or Hulu.

According to a survey, conducted by Harris Interactive and commissioned by Netflix, 61% of TV streamers admit to regular bouts of binge watching. Some even take it to an extreme level. Following the 14 February launch of the new season of House of Cards – the Netflix-produced remake of the British political drama – an estimated 2% of US subscribers had watched the entire 13-episode run in just three days, according to Procera, a broadband services and analytics company.

However, in its survey, Harris found little guilt attached to this sort of behaviour. Unlike binge eaters or drinkers, nearly three-quarters of TV streamers reported positive feelings towards binge watching.

The best metaphor?
Despite the negative connotations, Netflix seems to have embraced the term, with CEO Reed Hastings declaring that: “Netflix’s brand for TV shows is really about binge viewing… the ability to just get hooked and watch episode after episode… rather than get strung out.”

Still, the company did recently hire cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken to investigate this behaviour, and to determine whether ‘bingeing’ was really the right way to describe it.

“’We’re not sure that’s the best metaphor, you know… it’s certainly not the most flattering one,’” McCracken says, paraphrasing his early conversations with Netflix executives.

The term itself dates back to the late-1990s, says Oxford Dictionaries – which investigated the origins as part of the 2013 Word of the Year Award deliberations (‘selfie’ won). “The original context was watching programmes on full-season DVD sets, but the word has come into its own with the advent of on-demand viewing and online streaming.”

“People came up with their own metaphor for what they were doing,” says McCracken. “They decided that watching all this TV was bingeing behaviour.” However, he thinks ‘feasting’ is the better term to use, as a way to describe a more positive form of indulgence.

“I guess, in some cases, people are watching TV in such a way as to wake up in a semi-stupor, bleary eyed and covered in junk food after watching hours and hours of The Dukes of Hazzard,” he says. “But more often they’re fantastically engaged; they’re passionately interested in what’s going on.”

Smart viewers
The ‘couch potato’ has woken up, McCracken says, with TV viewers and content producers feeding off each other in “a virtuous cycle”. “Small steps in the evolution of TV have made for smarter viewers, and smarter viewers have made it possible to make better TV… Media literacy has gone way up.”

McCracken thinks social media has played a part in this too. “It has, effectively, made an editor, a producer, a creative out of all of us, to the extent that the way we build and then sustain and animate our social networks is by spotting and creating cultural content. And when we’re engaged in that way, I think we become more sophisticated in our understanding of all kinds of culture.”

• Grant McCracken was interviewed by Leanne Tomasevic, managing director of Truth UK, and Brian Tarran, editor of Research-live.com and Impact Magazine.
• McCracken is running a UK ‘Culture Camp’ in June, specifically for creatives, to expand their knowledge of the big changes transforming culture and to develop their ability to put this knowledge into action. Details of the Camp, sponsored by the Design Management Institute and Truth Consulting, are online here.