The Age of Netflix

by Cory Barker

  Perhaps the medium is perception, but the medium is changing. You can now carry a library of books and series on the same device and consume as much as you like. But television’s passive/addictive narrative is still connoted in the word binge.62 Imagine you spent the weekend reading a great book. You stayed up late turning pages and woke up early excited to jump back in. Maybe you finished the book in one epic sitting, or you devoured it in several bites. Would you feel ashamed of dedicating your whole weekend to reading? Would you feel embarrassed to tell colleagues or friends? Should spending your weekend engrossed in a television series be different?

  Culturally the difference is perceptual: books are traditionally associated with eggheads, television with couch potatoes. Although media scholars and journalists have long insisted otherwise, my interviews suggest that people still perceive reading books as a culturally and intellectually superior activity to watching television.63 The terrain of television’s cultural value is being rearticulated, but it is a slow process. Younger viewers tend to differentiate between Netflix binge-watching and television technology, while older viewers do not. There were some interesting contradictions during the interviews, for instance this exchange with the South Jersey graduate student:

  RESPONDENT: TV with commercials is so boring. I have neglected TV.

  E.S.: You don’t consider Netflix to be TV?

  RESPONDENT: Oh. I do…. Actually maybe I don’t. Haha! Sorry that’s not helpful.

  E.S.: No, it is.

  RESPONDENT: I think of TV as traditional, turn on the TV when a favorite show is on or maybe channel surfing. My TV watching is much more purposeful now. I don’t channel surf as much. TV is more an active activity for me now rather than passive? If that makes sense?

  Netflix has a lot to do with the shifting perception, but aspects of the old stigma remain and are evident in the guilt with which interviewees perceive their binge-watching. As one compulsive viewer admitted to me at the end of the interview, “I’m going to have a lot to think about as I reevaluate my behavior.” Although she chuckled at the statement, it was clear she felt guilty about how much television she watched. The stigma is rooted in popular perceptions of television consumption. If television’s content is cultural fast food then its consumer must be a tasteless, morbidly obese glutton for the lowest common denominator. But as John Fiske points out, “The lowest common denominator may be a useful concept in arithmetic, but in the study of popularity its only possible value is to expose the prejudices of those who use it.”64 Netflix is rebranding television as a gourmet meal, and the viewer an epicure. Media corporations may be getting richer the more that idea is swallowed, but so too are the content and audience experiences. But gluttony can happen in a three-star restaurant where the chefs still “worship at the altar of audience ratings.”65 If you believe that binge-watching has liberated audiences, you must appreciate the irony that the expression of that freedom is massive, obsessive consumption. The struggle for control of meaning making is bound by the liminality of the binge-viewer’s identity and his/her practice of binge-watching.

  This convergence of technology and culture is complicated and indeed seismic.66 Binary theoretical oppositions are insufficient to unpack it. To appreciate its nuances we must understand that binge-watching cannot be either positive or negative, cultural or structural, but an evolving human experience driven and energized by contradiction. Through this lens, a binge-viewer can be a bookworm and a couch potato. Binge-watching can be an addictive behavior and a meditative one. That is the ambivalence, rooted in the contradiction of pleasure negotiations that these conversations demonstrate.67 As media scholars analyzing binge-watching and Netflix, we should consider what C.W. Mills called the “sociological imagination”—a perspective that allows the observer to occupy multiple subject positions simultaneously.68 Doing so promotes a mirroring of subject and object: the (ad)vantage of seeing the forest and the trees.

  NOTES

  1. Xfinity, “Celebrities Binge-Watch TV Too,” accessed March 28, 2014, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ARulpPItWRs.

  2. Ibid. The spot also aired on a Comcast’s on-demand main menu during the same period.

  3. “Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013,” accessed February 24, 2016, http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/press-releases/oxford-dictionaries-word-of-the-year-2013/.

  4. Collins Language, “‘Binge-Watch’—Collins Word of the Year 2015,” Collins Dictionary, accessed February 24, 2016, https://www.collinsdictionary.com/word-lovers-blog/new/binge-watch-collins-word-of-the-year-2015,251,HCB.html.

  5. Deloitte, “Digital Democracy Survey: A Multi-Generational View of Consumer Technology, Media and Telecom Trends,” Digital Democracy Survey, 9th Edition. (2015), 11, accessed February 24, 2016, http://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/pages/technology-media-and-telecommunications/articles/digital-democracy-survey-generational-media-consumption-trends.html.

  6. HUFFPOST TV, “Which TV Shows Does Obama Watch?” The Huffington Post, December 30, 2013, accessed February 24, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/12/30/obama-tv_n_4518832.html; “Hillary Clinton Binge-Watches The Good Wife,” The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, accessed May 1, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_by4NUtNARY.

  7. Xfinity, “Celebrities Binge-Watch TV Too!”

  8. Amishi Arora and Khushbu Sahu, “Celebrity Endorsement and its Effect on Consumer Behavior,” International Journal of Retailing & Rural Business Perspectives 3.2 (2014): 866–869.

  9. Theodor Adorno, “How to Look at Television,” in The Culture Industry, ed. Jay M. Bernstein (New York: Routledge, 2001), 158.

  10. Ibid., 160. See also Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” in Mass Communication and Society, ed. James Curran, Michael Gurevitch, and Janet Woollacott (Beverley Hills: Sage, 1977), 349–383.

  11. Elihu Katz, “The End of Television?” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 625.1 (2009): 6–18.

  12. Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice (New York: Columbia University Press, 1944); George Gerbner, “Toward “Cultural Indicators”: The Analysis of Mass Mediated Message Systems,” AV Communication Review 17 (1969): 137; Joan D. Schleuder, Alice V. White, and Glen T. Cameron, “Priming Effects of Television News Bumpers and Teasers on Attention and Memory,” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media 37.4 (1993): 437; Albert Bandura, Dorothea Ross, and Sheila A. Ross, “Imitation of Film-Mediated Aggressive Models,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 66 (1963): 3.

  13. Jason Mittell, “The Cultural Power of an Anti-Television Metaphor: Questioning the ‘Plug-in Drug’ and a TV-Free America,” Television & New Media 1.2 (2000): 215–238; Laurie Ouellette and Justin Lewis, “Moving Beyond the ‘Vast Wasteland’: Cultural Policy and Television in the United States,” Television & New Media 1.1 (2000): 95–115; Harold Mendelsohn, “Socio-Psychological Construction and the Mass Communication Effects Dialectic,” Communication Research 16.6 (1989): 813–823; Katz does point out that early “theorizing by David Sarnoff (1941) … went on to predict that the new medium would bring people “home,” integrate the nation, and raise cultural standards, while also warning against the potential of political “showmanship,” the power of audiovisual advertising, and the danger of ideological propaganda.” See Katz, “The End of Television,” 8.

  14. Tony Bennett, “Popular Culture and the ‘Turn to Gramsci,’” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edition, ed. John Storey (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2009), 82.

  15. Ibid., 84.

  16. Ibid., 86.

  17. Ibid., 83.

  18. Chris Weedon, “Feminist Practice and Poststructuralist Theory,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader, 4th edition, ed. John Storey (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2009), 320.

  19. David Morley, Television, Audiences, and Cultural Studies (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1992), 18.

  20. Jan
ice Radway, “Reading Reading the Romance,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader 4th edition, ed. John Storey (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2009), 199.

  21. Jacqueline Bobo, “The Color Purple: Black Women as Cultural Readers,” in Cultural Theory and Popular Culture: A Reader 4th edition, ed. John Storey (Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited, 2009), 367.

  22. Katherine Sender, The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 2.

  23. For instance, see: Ethan Thompson and Jason Mittell, How to Watch Television (New York: New York University, 2013), 2; Mark Andrejevic, “Watching Television Without Pity: The Productivity of Online Fans,” Television & New Media 9.1 (2008): 24; and Sarah Banet-Weiser, Authentic™: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012), 64; Sender, The Makeover, 24.

  24. Mareike Jenner, “Is this TVIV? On Netflix, TVIII and Binge-Watching,” New Media & Society (2014): 3.

  25. Ally, “Binge-Watching Is the New Normal,” Fandom Obsessed, January 20, 2014, accessed February 24, 2016, http://fandomobsessed.com/binge-watching-is-the-new-normal/.

  26. Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 58.

  27. Sender, The Makeover, 165.

  28. James Carey, Communication as Culture, Revised Edition (New York: Routledge, 2008), 12.

  29. Emil Steiner, “Binge-Watching Framed: Textual and Content Analyses of the Media Coverage and Rebranding of Habitual Video Consumption” (unpublished manuscript, Temple University, 2014).

  30. Ien Ang, Desperately Seeking the Audience (New York: Routledge, 1991), 68.

  31. Amanda D. Lotz, “Assessing Qualitative Television Audience Research: Incorporating Feminist and Anthropological Theoretical Innovation,” Communication Theory 10.4 (2000): 447–467.

  32. Mary H.K. Choi, “In Praise of Binge TV Consumption,” Wired, December 27, 2011, accessed February 24, 2016, http://www.wired.com/2011/12/pl_column_tvseries/.

  33. Jason Mittell, “Serial Boxes,” Just TV, accessed February 24, 2016, https://justtv.wordpress.com/2010/01/20/serial-boxes/.

  34. For an examination of VCR and cable TV’s effect on network viewing see Dean M. Krugman and Roland T. Rust, “The Impact of Cable and VCR Penetration on Network Viewing: Assessing the Decade,” Journal of Advertising Research 33.1 (1993): 67–73.

  35. For cultural impacts of digital delivery see Chuck Tryon, On-Demand Culture: Digital Delivery and the Future of Movies (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2013).

  36. Marc Leverette, Brian L. Ott, and Cara Louise Buckley, ed., It’s Not TV: Watching HBO in the Post-Television Era (New York: Routledge, 2008), 37. See also: Thompson and Mittell, How to Watch Television, 312.

  37. Leverette, Ott, and Buckley, It’s Not TV, 2.

  38. Sam Laird, “How Streaming Video Is Killing the DVD,” Mashable, 2012, accessed February 24, 2016, http://mashable.com/2012/04/20/streaming-video-dvd-infographic/.

  39. The first “set-top boxes” were actually video game consoles, though these lacked synchronicity with robust digital content services initially.

  40. Saurabh Goel, “Cloud-Based Mobile Video Streaming Techniques,” International Journal of Wireless & Mobile Networks 5.1 (2013): 85–93.

  41. A viewer can watch, as I did, the first four episodes of House of Cards at home and then pause in the middle of the fifth episode to be dragged to the mall, but continue watching that episode on his/her cell phone in the car and then catch the sixth episode on an iPad at the Apple Store.

  42. Zac Stockton, “Netflix Won’t Own Binge-Viewing for Much Longer,” reels, July 21, 2014, accessed February 24, 2016, http://www.reelseo.com/netflix-wont-own-binge-viewing/.

  43. Mary McNamara, “Critic’s Notebook: The Side Effects of Binge Television,” Los Angeles Times, January 15, 2012, 1.

  44. Google Searches for: “binge-watching,” Worldwide, Google Trends (2004-present), accessed February 24, 2016, http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=binge%20watching&cmpt=q.

  45. “Netflix Declares Binge Watching Is the New Normal,” PRNewswire, December 13, 2013.

  46. “Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013.”

  47. Brian Stelter, “New Way to Deliver a Drama: All 13 Episodes in One Sitting,” New York Times, February 1, 2013, sec. A; Business/Financial Desk; Steiner, “Binge-Watching Framed,” 4.

  48. “Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2013.”

  49. Isabella Biedenharn, “Netflix’s Binge-Watching Warnings are the Best April Fool’s Prank,” Entertainment Weekly, April 1, 2014, accessed February 24, 2016, http://www.ew.com/article/2015/04/01/netflix-binge-watching-psa.

  50. “Netflix Declares.”

  51. Kathy Charmaz, Constructing Grounded Theory, 2nd Edition (Los Angeles: Sage, 2014), 109–224.

  52. Ibid.

  53. Choi, “In Praise of Binge TV Consumption.”

  54. Despite the claims made in “Celebrities,” food and eating was not claimed to be an integral part of binge-watching rituals by my interviewees.

  55. Ally, “Binge-Watching Is the New Normal”; Marcus Wohlsen, “When TV Is Obsolete, TV Shows Will Enter Their Real Golden Era,” Wired, May 15, 2014.

  56. PwC, “Feeling the Effects of the Videoquake,” 6.

  57. In “Binge-Watching Framed,” I argue that the distinction between marathon watching and binge-watching is in the consistency of content. A movie marathon, for instance, may be many different movies, but binge-watching is always the same show.

  58. For more on reality TV audience satisfaction and motives, see Lisa R. Godlewski and Elizabeth M. Perse, “Audience Activity and Reality Television: Identification, Online Activity, and Satisfaction,” Communication Quarterly 58.2 (2010): 148–169.

  59. Grant McCracken, “5 Things You Don’t Know about Binge Viewing” (unpublished manuscript, Harvard University, 2013), 1.

  60. Patrick Barwise and Andrew Ehrenberg, Television and Its Audience (London: Sage, 1988), 127.

  61. This format may have started with DVDs where the digital technology was better suited to jumping between sections than the smooth rewind and fast-forward of mechanized VCRs.

  62. Ian Christie, Audiences: Defining and Researching Screen Entertainment Reception (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2013), 159. For a deeper discussion of passive/addictive narrative see Seth Finn, “Television Addiction?” An Evaluation of Four Competing Media-Use Models, Journalism Quarterly 69.2 (1992): 422–435; Mittell, “The Cultural Power of an Anti-Television Metaphor.”

  63. Jenner, “Is this TVIV,” 5.

  64. John Fiske, Television Culture (New York: Methuen, 1987), 309.

  65. Pierre Bourdieu, “Television,” European Review 9.3 (2001): 251.

  66. For more on the integration of audience in and through new television technology see Elizabeth Evans, Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media, and Daily Life (New York: Routledge, 2011); Christine Quail, “Television Goes Online: Myths and Realities in the Contemporary Context,” Global Media Journal 12.20 (2012). For more on digital discrimination see Joseph Turow, Niche Envy: Marketing Discrimination in the Digital Age (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006); Steinar Ellingsen, “Seismic Shifts: Platforms, Content Creators, and Spreadable Media” Media International Australia, Incorporating Culture & Policy 150 (2014): 106–113.

  67. Storey, Cultural Theory and Popular Culture, 98.

  68. C. Wright Mills, “The Sociological Imagination,” in Social Theory: The Multicultural and Classic Readings, ed. Charles Lemert (Boulder: Westview, 1999), 351–352.

  Narrowcasting, Millennials and the Personalization of Genre in Digital Media

  ALISON N. NOVAK

  In 2006, Netflix announced a $1 million prize for research teams who could successfully help them improve their rating algorithm. The goal was to use the large amounts of data collected from users to make better film and television suggestions for individual users.1 By 2012, researchers dedicated ov
er 2,000 hours to combine 107 algorithms that would produce automated recommendations for users. Netflix branded this addition to the platform as a feature of personalization, control, and convenience, and remarked on its innovation in the online streaming world.2 Regarding Netflix’s ongoing push towards improving the automated system, scholars noted that while the improvements were innovative, the practice of making suggestions to viewers was already in place as a far-reaching trend known as “narrowcasting.”3

  This essay explores the drive towards narrowcasting and Netflix’s practice of making personalized recommendations for users based on its rating system. While narrowcasting has been an industry norm for years, its oppositional relationship to the historical model of broadcasting suggests that Netflix’s personalization is a force of change within the film and television industry. Today, many other platforms share Netflix’s narrowcasting model and make personalized recommendations for users through collected data. Therefore, this essay looks at how narrowcasting is presented to users, and how the practice is embraced or understood—both important and timely issues due to the rising popularity of streaming media.