This project is a transnational case study on the binge-watching and media habits of sixty interviewees from Brazil, China, the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Israel, Kenya, the Netherlands, Pakistan, Romania, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Turkey, Ukraine, the United Arab Emirates, the United Kingdom and the United States.
First, it zooms in and asks what habits interviewees had at the time of the interview. How did interviewees habitually stop watching for the day? What cues in their environment were most likely to successfully trigger the end of a watch session, and which were most likely to fail? Second, it zooms out, and investigates how robust interviewees’ media habits were when faced with major habit discontinuities. When interviewees moved across borders, found partners or lost them, found employment or left it, had children or had children move out, did it affect their video watching habits? Which life events were most strongly associated with habit changes? It uses interviews grounded in trace data (platform logs of user behavior) from several major video platforms in order to study what habits people have around watching video, and if those habits are rigid or elastic when confronted with major life events. Using trace data as a prompt during interviews made it possible to elicit details of repetitive behavior, and also to observe how that behavior changed over time.
This research finds that binge-watching, and video habits more generally, are a state, not a trait. They can be altered by changing cues in viewers’ environments. Some cues are more successful than others at ending individual viewing sessions. The end of an episode or the sense of time having passed are the least successful, and the loss of a given kind of content or being interrupted by a concrete, immediate obligation to pay attention elsewhere are the most successful.
For major life events, different life events have different effects. A high degree of cognitive migration is associated with changes in what people watch after a move. Sharing a household with other people is associated with alternating between episodes of different shows, as well as with exposure to different watching practices and content which are adapted as people move through time and across borders.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:columbia.edu/oai:academiccommons.columbia.edu:10.7916/tsxw-fq78 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Pierce-Grove, Ri |
| Source Sets | Columbia University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Theses |
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