Binge Watching
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VIewship numbers are a lot like participant numbers on a web site. One person says "anyone who has an account" counts. Another person says "only people who have posted" count. Another says "only those that post daily" count. Everyone has a different opinion on what a viewer is.
Modern "mainstream" television viewing involves televisions left on around the house much of the evening. People wander by, in and out, sit and watch, talk, whatever. In a house with a family of six, how do you even measure viewership when a television is on, there are six people, and no one paid attention to the show?
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@scottalanmiller said in Binge Watching:
I wonder what percentage of people have ever had the shared viewing phenomenon. I didn't have it ever, and I grew up in the era of just four networks (ABC, NBC, CBS and PBS.) If you watched television, chances are you saw the same things as other people. And it still wasn't a high enough percentage to create the effect. I wonder if it is actually a very small group that ever managed to have that effect and, for all intents and purposes, I would guess that it died with cable before DVR and Netflix. People were watching differently, at different times, for a very long time.
Huh, you're younger than me and you left off Fox. No Fox where you were? I clearly recall when Fox joined the ranks of the big 3 1987 , I never considered PBS a network channel - but I understand why others do, so I won't belabor the point.
You and your friends didn't talk about shows that you watched the night before? hmm... that was a primary focus of conversation. of course with cable, the larger number of shows, the chances that you saw the same show as someone else was lower, but peer groups still, in my experience, had more overlap than not.
It makes me wonder how socially engaged you were? I suppose your social group could be the ones that simply didn't watch much TV compared to say, playing chess all night (yes I'm making fun). Those groups absolutely exist, but they are far from the norm. TV and movies en mass today are not made for the intellectual, they are made for the masses. If the masses weren't watching them, they wouldn't be made, or at bare minimum they would be much less popular.
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@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:
Huh, you're younger than me and you left off Fox. No Fox where you were? I clearly recall when Fox joined the ranks of the big 3 1987 , I never considered PBS a network channel - but I understand why others do, so I won't belabor the point.
Fox was a new network that took over one of the non-network channels where I was as a kid. It actually came in 1986 to us, we had a pioneer station. But it wasn't a real network at that point yet. It was still showing independent stuff like it had before for a few years. I was gone before they began having their own content like a normal network.
PBS is a quasi-channel.
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@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:
You and your friends didn't talk about shows that you watched the night before? hmm... that was a primary focus of conversation. of course with cable, the larger number of shows, the chances that you saw the same show as someone else was lower, but peer groups still, in my experience, had more overlap than not.
No, we really did not. It has always stood out in my memory that my friend Julie used to watch Who's the Boss and we would talk about that, just the two of us, because no one else watched it. It is my specific memory of a show that that happened with. Of regular broadcast shows, that's the only one that I know of that that happened with. Special events, of course.
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@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:
It makes me wonder how socially engaged you were?
I'd say the same thing.... maybe I was too social for passive entertainment to be the main topic of conversation
We were too busy being social to talk about television. Of all people, it seems odd to guess that I was not the social one. -
@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:
If the masses weren't watching them, they wouldn't be made, or at bare minimum they would be much less popular.
I never said that the masses didn't watch them, I'm saying that I've had no exposure to the masses watching the same ones, at the same time and then overlapping and choosing to discuss them. It's a lot more than people watching the same stuff.
And there was a lot of "we watching the same stuff on Friday night", I think, compared to other days of the week, but by Monday, no one was talking about Friday shows.
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So my roommate is someone that is a totally different generation and totally different everything than me (26 year old girl, college grad, traditional work life) and is super social. She never turns on a television whatsoever during the week because she is either at work or going out in the evenings or sleeping. Being social takes away her viewing time. Maybe she's also a special snowflake, but calling everyone that doesn't do the proposed activity can't all be snowflakes. Especially when I'm proposing that the concept itself is only for special snowflakes.
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So let's use stats. The most watched show in the US right now is BBT with just under 21m viewers. That's not 21m interested viewers, that's not 21m "really like the show" viewers. That's 21m people for whom the television was on in their house. The number of people who like it, are engaged, paid attention, etc. is a fraction of that.
The US population is over 330m. So that means that only 15% of the nation even sees the show, at all, let alone at the same time (DVR offsets, different time zones, etc.) on a weekly basis. And as that is a show equally for kids and adults, it does spread out over the group pretty well compared to some other shows.
So when you go to work, think about that only 15% of all people could have seen that one show. ANd that's not 15% for a show per night, that's the top show of the whole year. Six nights a week there is no show with even 15%.
So let's say that the overlap of those that see a show, those that are able to pay attention and those that care enough to discuss it (what's there to talk about in a show like that?) is 5%. That means 19 out of 20 people in your office have no means of discussing an overlapping show with you (or this one, anyway.)
Now that remaining 5% has to meet up at work, and decide that that will be the topic of conversation.
THe numbers show that this shouldn't be something happening with high regularity.
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@JaredBusch said in Binge Watching:
@scottalanmiller said in Binge Watching:
@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:
@JaredBusch said in Binge Watching:
people are stupid when it comes to spoilers. I mean fuck, just because someone tells you Han dies, does not ruin the entire movie.
Or that some walking dead person did something does not ruin the entire episode because you still have the entire show to see the detail and context.
I will disagree with you, mostly. Some spoilers are less important than others.
My friend ruined The Matrix for me by telling me it was a computer world - that was the whole big reveal of the movie! WTF! sure, the rest was fine, but not coming to that understanding as you're meant to by the director definitely takes something away from the viewing experience..
That's a great example. That movie was terrible and depended solely on you being surprised there. If you rewatch the movie without the surprise, it's pretty bad.
That reveal happened at the beginning of the movie and has nothing to do with making the point of the movie. @Dashrender is wrong on this. If knowing that the movie was a computer world ruined the entire remaining movie then you simply never liked the movie to begin with.
It was a huge part of the movie. If you go in knowing that, then the rest of the movie is just the ride of sluffing off oppression. But if you don't know that, you spend a good portion of the movie learning to accept the possibility that our world isn't real, it changes the dynamic of the first time viewing experience.
Don't get me wrong, it wasn't a bad movie. I kinda like the first one, the rest, yeah don't bother.As for @scottalanmiller opinion that the movie is bad, that is again his opinion, not an immutable fact.
Agreed
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@scottalanmiller said in Binge Watching:
@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:
Heck, if we wanna believe Star Trek, TV watching all but completely dies out at some point in the future
Star Trek is a good example .... that would have been one of those shows that we would have talked about places... but it was not shown at the same time even in the 1980s because it wasn't on a network.
Eh? Where was it shown when you were watching TV? It was on Fox in Omaha, and only Fox. So anyone in my peer group and the people I worked with, I wasn't an international traveler back then, heck not even an outside my city traveler. So those I would converse with normally were all seeing it the same way I was. Unlike today, there are any number of ways to watch something.
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@scottalanmiller said in Binge Watching:
@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:
But dumping an entire season has completely changed the dynamic. Now you might not watch a show for months after it was originally released, removing the social aspect of the show almost completely.
That's almost always been the case. VHS and DVD did this a few eras before Netflix did.
Not for a first showing. Where there people who saw it for the first time on VHS and DVD, sure, but this wasn't common in my social circles.
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@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:
@scottalanmiller said in Binge Watching:
@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:
Heck, if we wanna believe Star Trek, TV watching all but completely dies out at some point in the future
Star Trek is a good example .... that would have been one of those shows that we would have talked about places... but it was not shown at the same time even in the 1980s because it wasn't on a network.
Eh? Where was it shown when you were watching TV? It was on Fox in Omaha, and only Fox. So anyone in my peer group and the people I worked with, I wasn't an international traveler back then, heck not even an outside my city traveler. So those I would converse with normally were all seeing it the same way I was. Unlike today, there are any number of ways to watch something.
It was independent when I was a kid. Fox was one of the more popular networks to pick it up later, but that was because they lacked their own content. It was Paramount and syndicated. So anyone that wanted it could shot it, it was never a Fox show. So it was a Saturday show where I was, Thursdays for a lot of people.
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@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:
@scottalanmiller said in Binge Watching:
@Dashrender said in Binge Watching:
But dumping an entire season has completely changed the dynamic. Now you might not watch a show for months after it was originally released, removing the social aspect of the show almost completely.
That's almost always been the case. VHS and DVD did this a few eras before Netflix did.
Not for a first showing. Where there people who saw it for the first time on VHS and DVD, sure, but this wasn't common in my social circles.
In your social circles is always key. These things disrupted the "everyone seeing it at once" things. Some people recorded on VHS and watched days or weeks or months later (but showed up in the viewer stats, which shows why those aren't the facts we expect them to be) and later many (lots in my social circles) waited for things on DVD so that they could binge in comfort when they had time.
Yes, your special circumstances easily allowed for this to happen that you overlapped enough to discuss shows all the time even though the viewer numbers and stat suggest that this would be difficult. I'm just saying that it seems like, and mathematically appears like, a relatively special case.
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Here is another way to look at it.... maybe modern binge watching like Stranger Things as shifted which social circles see the effect. I propose that it has always been a special snowflake that could have this happen and that you and @JaredBusch just happened to fit that one traditionally (or in the 1990s.) And today the circles that get this have shifted to other ones that you are no longer in.
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Interesting - I'm willing to accept that my social group might be different from others. Since I don't study this stuff, I have little to no exposure to other social circles, so knowing if they talk about shows or not is something I don't know.
But it seems like it would be far more likely that people would be than not, but that my just be my social bias.
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I think you still get that social aspect of the "we are all watching this together" with binging, especially in conjunction with social media. So while your personal social circle might not have that shared experience, countless others are in online communities (like this) that are all taking it in at the same time and are discussing it. I know I watched things like Stranger Things and Making A Murderer and immediately went to Reddit or other popular communities to talk about it even if my personal social circle hadn't finished it.
There's also a delayed sense of that special feeling of watching it together. "Have you seen ____? I just finished it, what do you think?"
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Sorry, but to expand on my last point--I'm more than willing to discuss shows I've already watched, especially if someone has just finished it. I like hearing about their flash reactions and how they're processing the story and compare it to what I think.
What I'm trying to say is: I got a really good theory that Mike's dad from Stranger Things is up to something nefarious and I want to discuss it.
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@ChrisL said in Binge Watching:
What I'm trying to say is: I got a really good theory that Mike's dad from Stranger Things is up to something nefarious and I want to discuss it.
Dude, spoilers... I may still remember that by the time I get around to watching.
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@ChrisL said in Binge Watching:
I think you still get that social aspect of the "we are all watching this together" with binging, especially in conjunction with social media.
I feel like you get it more. Now less mainstream communities, which is a lot of people, can participate too.
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@scottalanmiller said in Binge Watching:
@ChrisL said in Binge Watching:
I think you still get that social aspect of the "we are all watching this together" with binging, especially in conjunction with social media.
I feel like you get it more. Now less mainstream communities, which is a lot of people, can participate too.
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