by Cory Barker
The Square is part of the ongoing trajectory of participatory culture, spreadability, and civically engaged tactical media posing a challenge to what we do with increasingly mobile media, why we watch it, and why it is worth accessing. It represents a challenge to not just “rinse and repeat”—to binge-watch copious amounts of political documentaries through Netflix or other streaming services—but to engage the media we spread and circulate, and to think about ways to bridge online and offline spaces in new forms of civic engagement. The spreadability of digitally circulated political documentaries continues to expand our potential engagement with a plurality of civic spaces.
NOTES
1. Tim Markham, “Social Media, Protest Cultures and Political Subjectivities of the Arab Spring,” Media, Culture & Society 36.1 (2014): 90.
2. Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson, “Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations from Tahrir Square,” Journal of Communication 62 (2013): 366.
3. Neal Romanek, “YouTube Runs Netflix Oscar Nom The Square in Egypt,” TVBEurope, March 4, 2014, accessed March 15, 2014, http://www.tvbeurope.com/youtube-runs-netflix-oscar-nom-the-square-in-egypt-2/.
4. W.J.T. Mitchell, Cloning Terror: The War of Images, 9/11 to the Present (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 123.
5. As of this writing, the most recent information on network bandwidth comes from May 2014. See further: Todd Spangler, “Netflix Remains King of Bandwidth Usage, While YouTube Declines,” Variety, May 14, 2014, accessed December 16, 2014, http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/netflix-youtube-bandwidth-usage-1201179643/.
6. Chuck Tryon, On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013). Tryon charts a shift in cinema culture towards an increasing desire for instantaneity and evolving of flows of media through downstream windows.
7. Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 208.
8. See further: Douglas Kellner, Media Spectacle and Insurrection, 2011: From the Arab Uprising to Occupy Everywhere (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012); Manual Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2012); and Slavoj Žižek, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously (New York: Verso, 2012).
9. Mark Warschauer, Technology and Social Inclusion: Rethinking the Digital Divide (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 38; emphasis in original.
10. Joel Penney and Caroline Dadas, “(Re)Tweeting in the Service of Protest: Digital Composition and Circulation in the Occupy Wall Street Movement,” New Media & Society 16.1 (2014): 75.
11. Jan A.G.M. van Dijk, The Deepening Divide (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2005), 173.
12. Manuel Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, 56.
13. Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1984 [1974]), 26.
14. Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, 57.
15. Paolo Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets: Social Media and Contemporary Activism (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 11.
16. Gerbaudo, Tweets and the Streets, 5.
17. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy, “Introduction: Orientations: Mapping MediaSpace,” in MediaSpace: Place, Scale and Culture in a Media Age, ed. Nick Couldry and Anna McCarthy (New York: Routledge, 2004), 2.
18. Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, 10.
19. Ibid., 57. Castells argues the burgeoning ordinariness of cell phone use in Egypt further contributed to this. This point certainly has resonances with Henry Jenkins’s goal of blurring the boundaries between producers and consumers/users, or the somewhat popular emergence of the word “produser,” which collapses any sense of boundary between the two. See further Alex Burns, “Towards Produsage: Futures for User-Led Content Production,” 2006, accessed December 15, 2014, http://eprints.qut.edu.au/4863/1/4863_1.pdf; and S. Elizabeth Bird “Are We All Produsers Now?” Cultural Studies 25.4–5 (2011): 502–516.
20. Castells, Networks of Outrage and Hope, 61.
21. Philip N. Howard and Malcolm R. Parks, “Social Media and Political Change: Capacity, Constraint, and Consequence,” Journal of Communication 62 (2013): 360.
22. Zeynep Tufekci and Christopher Wilson, “Social Media,” 370.
23. Merlyna Lim, “Clicks, Cabs, and Coffee Houses: Social Media and Oppositional Movements in Egypt, 2004–2011,” Journal of Communication 62 (2013): 232.
24. This also has resonances with Lawrence Lessig’s distinction between a “read only” culture of consumption, and a “read write” culture where users are actively encouraged to add to or otherwise change the media objects they encounter. See Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (London: Bloomsbury, 2008).
25. Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green, Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 2
26. Ibid., 3, 6.
27. Ibid., 7.
28. Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond have developed similar ideas in their concept of the “Like economy,” where “user interactions are instantly transformed into comparable forms of data and presented to other users in a way that generates more traffic and engagement” through a case study of Facebook’s “like” and “share” buttons. See further Carolin Gerlitz and Anne Helmond, “The Like Economy: Social Buttons and the Data-Intensive Web,” New Media & Society 15.8 (2013), 1349.
29. Joseph Turow, “Introduction: On Not Taking the Hyperlink for Granted,” in The Hyperlinked Society: Questioning Connections in the Digital Age, ed. Joseph Turow and Lokman Tsui (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 2008), 3.
30. Jussi Parikka, “Contagion and Repetition: On the Viral Logic of Network Culture,” Ephemera 7.2 (2007): 288.
31. Ibid., 289. See also Steven Shaviro, Connected, or What It Means to Live in the Network Society (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003).
32. Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media, 21.
33. Ibid., 28.
34. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (New York: Harper and Row, 1987).
35. Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media, 39.
36. Ibid., 155.
37. Ganaele Langlois, “Participatory Culture and the New Governance of Communication: The Paradox of Participatory Media,” Television & New Media 14.2 (2012): 92.
38. See further Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), 29–42.
39. Rita Raley, Tactical Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009), 3.
40. Ibid., 6.
41. Ibid., 10.
42. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 37.
43. Raley, Tactical Media, 14.
44. Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom (New York: Public Affairs, 2012), 190.
45. Ibid., 276.
46. Ibid., 185.
47. Henry Jenkins and Nico Carpentier, “Theorizing Participatory Intensities: A Conversation about Participation and Politics,” Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies 19.3 (2013): 266.
48. Ibid., 281.
49. See further David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), and Thomas Waugh, “Introduction: Why Documentaries Keep Trying to Change the World, or Why People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries,” in Show Us Life: Toward a History and Aesthetics of the Committed Documentary, ed. Thomas Waugh (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1984), xi–xxvii.
50. Merrit Kennedy, “An Oscar Nominee, but Unwelcome at Home in Cairo,” NPR, February 5, 2014, accessed March 15, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/02/05/271517965/an-oscar-nominee-but-unwelcome-at-home-in-cairo.
51. Jenkins, Ford, and Green, Spreadable Media, 219.
52. Chuck Tryon, On-Demand Culture. This st
ands somewhat at odds with the way Charles R. Acland has theorized the continued importance of cinema culture in the wake of downstream revenue windows. See Acland, Screen Traffic: Movies, Multiplexes, and Global Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003).
53. Tryon, On-Demand Culture, 14.
54. Ibid., 41.
55. Merrit Kennedy, “An Oscar Nominee, but Unwelcome at Home in Cairo”; Alex Ritman, “Jehane Noujaim’s ‘The Square’ Makes Debut in Egypt,” The Hollywood Reporter, June 7, 2014, accessed May 5, 2015, http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/jehane-noujaim-s-square-makes-710046.
56. Neal Romanek, “YouTube Runs Netflix Oscar Nom The Square in Egypt.”
57. Blake Hallinan and Ted Striphas, “Recommended for You: The Netflix Prize and the Production of Algorithmic Culture,” New Media & Society 18.1 (2014): 129; emphasis added.
58. Eli Pariser has called this kind of practice a “you loop,” where the only content that gets directed at an online user is content that user has already expressed agreement or interest in. See Pariser, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You (New York: Penguin Press, 2011).
59. Thierry Kuntzel, “The Film Work,” Enclitic 2.1 (1978): 38–61.
60. “Watch The Square Online,” Netflix, accessed April 10, 2014. http://www.netflix.com/WiMovie/The_Square/70268449?
61. Ibid.
62. Ibid.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid.
65. Ibid.
66. Ibid.; emphasis added.
67. Ibid.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.; emphasis in original.
72. Ibid.
73. Jane Gaines, “Political Mimesis,” Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 88.
74. Jane Gaines, “Political Mimesis,” 92.
75. For more information on Virunga, see Steve Pond, “‘Virunga’ Is Netflix Documentary Gem: How Filmmakers Are Trying to Bring Down Big Oil,” The Wrap, November 7, 2014, accessed Dec. 19, 2014, http://www.thewrap.com/virunga-is-netflix-documentary-gem-how-filmmakers-are-trying-to-bring-down-big-oil/. For more information about the Adam Sandler deal, see Todd Spangler, “Netflix Signs Adam Sandler to Exclusive Four-Movie Deal,” Variety, October 1 2014, accessed December 19, 2014, http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/netflix-signs-adam-sandler-to-exclusive-four-movie-deal-1201319066/.
76. Hallinan and Striphas, “Recommended for You,” 128.
Part Three: Netflix as Narrowcaster and as Global Player
* * *
Binge-Watching in Practice
The Rituals, Motives and Feelings of Streaming Video Viewers
EMIL STEINER
Tomorrow: @HouseOfCards. No spoilers, please.—@BarackObama, February 13, 2014
Laurence Fishburne generally doesn’t “do more than six episodes.” Paul Rudd “watched twelve episodes in a row.” Judy Greer “watched the whole season of Veep (2012–) in one sitting … but that was during Sandy, the hurricane.” Dennis Leary recommends doing it alone, but Michelle Monaghan disagrees. Zosia Mamet says you can do it “in your birthday suit,” but Keri Russell prefers wearing “bad pajamas.” Tom Riley favors “whiskey and a onesie,” while Hannah New prefers “rum.” Method Man likes “mangos,” but for Matthew Rhys it’s “vodka and hot dogs.”1
These are some of the descriptions of binge-watching practices and rituals that appear in a multiplatform advertisement from Comcast Xfinity called “Celebrities Binge-Watch TV Too!” The commercial was posted to YouTube on March 28, 2014, in the run-up to “Xfinity Watchathon Week,” a seven-day event each spring during which Comcast subscribers are given free on-demand access to full seasons of popular programs from broadcast networks and pay cable channels. The actors from some of those series appear in the advertisement describing how they binge-watch.2 The annual promotion is an attempt by America’s largest cable provider to entice viewers into subscription services by tapping into their voracious appetite for video content through binge-watching.
The informational and endorsing language of the promo spot indicates that “binge-watching” is a nascent English term whose value is being negotiated in and through media. Oxford Dictionaries ranked “binge-watch” the second most popular new word of 2013, behind only “selfie.”3 Collins Dictionary anointed it Word of the Year in 2015.4 That same year a survey by Deloitte found that “Two-thirds of viewers ‘binge-watch’ TV.”5 Apparently President Barack Obama is one of them; so is Hillary Clinton.6 As such, the liminal linguistic position (“Has binge always been a verb?”) and self-conscious usage (“but that was during Sandy, the hurricane”) of binge-watching demand deeper investigation.7 Such celebrity endorsements may expedite acceptance of an emerging behavior and serve as a model for its imitation.8 However, is Comcast’s depiction representative of “binge viewers” generally? This essay attempts to explore how non-celebrity audiences define, practice, and feel about binge-watching and Netflix through qualitative, open-ended interviewing. My analysis of how viewers understand the behavior provides an orientation for academic and commercial research that points to a broader reimagining of television’s cultural identity. As one interviewee told me, “Broadcast television is dead.” The streaming video delivery popularized by Netflix has empowered viewers to be more agentic consumers of culture, while forcing traditional broadcasters and producers to adapt their content and its delivery. That viewers have enthusiastically embraced the complicated term binge-watching speaks to the complex, ambivalent, and ironic signification of post-industrial culture.
Theory Binge
During much of the twentieth century, scholars depicted the content of broadcast television as mass-produced, low value entertainment and the audiences as gullible receivers staring glaze-eyed into flickering cathode-ray tubes.9 The Frankfurt School was particularly harsh in its deterministic critique of such popular culture; Theodor Adorno considered television a threat to aesthetics with the potential for mind control. He and other Marxists theorists characterized television as a tool to perpetuate mindless capitalist consumption. Viewers, they argued, were trained into a culture of aspiration that mitigated their ability and desire to question the political and economic structures of the powerful elite who controlled the airways.10
As the television set became a mainstream appliance in the 1950s and 1960s, American social scientists began empirically studying its “effects” on audiences. Although audiences were not found to be automatons, effects researchers did treat them as passive receivers.11 Their findings indicated that while the media cannot necessarily change minds, it can set the news agenda, cultivate perceptions of reality, prime issues in viewers’ minds, and influence viewer behavior.12 These examinations of media effects were largely unidirectional and ignored the individuality and agency of the viewer. Thus, from not long after its mainstream inception, broadcast television’s identity seemed fixed to the “Idiot Box” narrative—an industrialized system of commoditized, low-brow culture with the power to manipulate its passive viewers into consumerist ideology and potentially violent behavior.13
The Idiot Box narrative began to be challenged by cultural theorists of the 1960s and 1970s. During those decades, the “cultural sphere [was] divided into two hermetically separate regions.”14 Film, television, and popular literature (media) were studied through the theoretical lens of structuralism while “lived events” (rituals, customs) of the working-class were studied through “culturalism.”15 According to Tony Bennett, the former sought patterns in the content as evidence of the ruling class’s domination of the masses through mechanized subservience. Conversely, the latter scoured popular culture for “romantic” and “authentic” expressions of subordinated voices shouting proudly against the tempest of domination.16 Bennett proposed merging the two through Gramscian hegemony in order to “disqualif[y] the bipolar alternatives of structuralism and culturalism.”17 Such a move acknowledges the complexity o
f a viewer’s power to negotiate meaning and the nuances of the economic and political structures behind television culturally and technologically.
Poststructural feminism scholars of the 1980s and 1990s rebranded audiences’ voices as challengers to the status quo.18 Building on Michel Foucault, Chris Weedon examined experience through subject position and motive, activating the audience’s role in discourse.19 Janice Radway encouraged negotiation and renegotiation of the “nature of the relationship between audiences and texts.”20 Meanwhile, Jacqueline Bobo challenged the Frankfurt School’s top-down power dynamics and the unidirectional flows of early social scientists: “Producers of mainstream media products are not aligned in a conspiracy against an audience.”21 Recognizing the relationship of producers and viewers as cooperative can “legitimize the audiences’ scrutinizing gaze,” while complicating traditional power dynamics.22
The Idiot Box narrative has been further complicated in recent years by the technological blurring of what television is, the ambivalence associated with digital labor, “performances and the production of user-generated content,” and self-conscious audience participation.23 In this post-industrial narrative, the viewer and the broadcaster share and negotiate the meaning of texts. Series that failed on broadcast television, such as Arrested Development on Fox (2003–2006; 2013), have been reincarnated on Netflix through viewer demand and the affordances of subscription based streaming video. Even popular series, like Breaking Bad (2008–2013), saw their cultural footprint expand further as a result of Netflix releasing prior seasons so new fans could catch up through binge. As one interviewee told me, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2015–) is made for Netflix, not NBC,” the network for which the Tina Fey–produced sitcom was originally created. Producers use viewer feedback to shape scripts, while viewer behaviors like binge-watching have encouraged writers to craft complex narrative arcs designed to be viewed in bulk rather than once a week.
