Today I stumbled across a tweet from my favorite news source, The Week, that caught my attention. "We're hard-wired to binge watch. The science behind our Netflix addictions," it read. It was an interesting enough claim to click. But as much as I (usually) love The Week, this article was way off.
The article is called, "The science behind our insatiable need to binge-watch TV: It turns out we're wired to watch episode after episode after episode." The author claims to have discovered a scientific explanation for binge-watching. But the "scientific evidence" (which ranges from psychological to anthropological in nature) doesn't really explain our Netflix addiction at all. Here are a few of the article's explanations and why I don't like them:
1. Empathy
Apparently the human ability to feel "empathy," a term coined at the turn of the 20th century but that has been around since the beginning of time, explains binge-watching. I don't deny that empathy helps us feel more emotionally connected to the characters we watch, but that's not a new phenomenon. Empathy made me feel attached to all of my favorite childhood TV characters, too. And if anything, having to wait a week until the next airing of my favorite show made me even more attached to them, left wondering what they would do next. Now that Netflix has given us access to full seasons, we can come and go as we please, which I would argue could make us less invested in characters.
2. "Neurocinematics"
A term coined by a Princeton psychologist that deals with how our brain responds to videos. His findings are pretty obvious... the more clear-cut the emotions conveyed are in the clip, or the stronger the action, the more people's brains react in the same way. Basically, a scene of a bunch of people getting their heads chopped off elicits a more similar response from viewers than a scene of the afternoon activity at a Manhattan park. Duh? The article also never really ties "neurocinematics" to binge-watching, which is a content-neutral phenomenon.
3. People like it.
"In a survey commissioned by Netflix, 61 percent of 1,500 online respondents claimed to binge-watch Netflix regularly, and three-quarters reported having positive feelings in doing this."
Okay, so you've told us that people are doing it and that they like it. Not exactly groundbreaking, especially coming from Netflix itself.
It kind of seems like The Week is grasping for straws here. In reality, there is a much more simple explanation. Science doesn't make us prone to binge-watching; society does. Binge-watching is an escape from all the clutter and the stress we experience on a daily basis. Just like how people went to the movie theater to escape their busy jobs, people now just hop into bed and marry their laptops to find solace. Only today we have a whole lot more to escape, so we're practicing more extreme forms of escaping.
Another much more plausible explanation is basic economics. Netflix wants us to binge-watch. There's a reason they release full seasons at once. They want us to get hooked and leave us feeling like how I felt when I annihilated Season 2 of House of Cards in one day: Empty. And what better way to fill the hole inside us than with more Netflix? Seems pretty convenient for Netflix's revenue stream.
Binge-watching isn't something we're hardwired to do. It's a learned behavior we developed after Netflix suddenly handed us instant access to full seasons of our favorite shows. We learn all kinds of behavior in response to new tools. We weren't hardwired to think in 140 characters-- Jack Dorsey founded Twitter and we learned to communicate in shorter language. Then the news media caught on and started feeding us small bits of content to appease our shortening attention spans. Then Buzzfeed started making lists to organize the clutter of bits into a format we could digest. Our behavior is constantly adapting to new technologies, and new technologies are constantly giving us new ways to practice this behavior.
The problem with the scientific explanation for binge-watching is that it's science that's been around for forever. We've always been hardwired to feel empathy and react certain way to stimuli, but binge-watching is a relatively new phenomenon. That's why I argue our helpless Netflix addictions are much more simple: We were all suffering from digital-induced information overload and a poor economy, and Netflix seized the opportunity to provide us with an escape.
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