Television Studies, We Need to Talk about “Binge-Viewing”

2019 ◽  
pp. 152747641987704 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Turner
Keyword(s):  
Academic Research ◽  
Television Studies ◽  
Audience Research ◽  
Widespread Application ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Television Audience

This article argues that a crucial task for a renewed investment in television audience research now is to investigate the range of practices currently covered by the label of binge-viewing. Notwithstanding the widespread application of the concept of binge-viewing within both industry commentary and academic research, this article will suggest that the concept has reached the point where it has outlived its usefulness for television studies. Rather than staying with what has become an extremely imprecise term, the argument continues, television studies should turn its attention toward generating more located and nuanced observational accounts of the evolving “cultures of use” within consumer households in order to develop a more accurate and usable set of terms to describe what is actually happening in domestic spaces as people watch television.

Approaching the cultures of use: Netflix, disruption and the audience

2019 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 222-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Graeme Turner
Keyword(s):  
Empirical Research ◽  
Television Studies ◽  
Cultural Consumption ◽  
Audience Research ◽  
Research Project ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Audience Studies ◽  
Everyday Lives ◽  
Direct Knowledge ◽  
Television Audience

This article draws on an empirical research project on cultural consumption in order to respond to particular concerns this project raised about our understanding of the current regimes of consumption for television, or what this article describes as the ‘cultures of use’. While there are rich literatures around many aspects of television consumption, this article argues that there is a gap in our direct knowledge of how individuals and households consume television, across platforms and devices, in domestic spaces. In order to fill that gap and to better understand how television consumption is embedded within people’s everyday lives, television studies may need not only to ask new kinds of questions through its research but also to adapt and modify some of the modes of audience research that marked the beginnings of television audience studies.

scholarly journals Watching Dallas again 1: Doing retro audience research

2014 ◽  
Vol 19 ◽  
Author(s):  
Amanda Gilroy
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Research Methods ◽  
Audience Reception ◽  
Master's Level ◽  
Audience Research ◽  
Influential Book ◽  
Television Audience ◽  
Critical Reflections

This essay and the audience reception projects it introduces alleviate the desperation of seeking the television audience by recourse to Ien Ang's influential book, Watching Dallas ([1982] 1985). Within the context of a unit on audience research in a master's-level course on media, two groups of students explored the possibilities of remixing Ang in the present digital media landscape via informants' comments on the first season of the new series of Dallas (2012–14). Discourses of nostalgia circulate within and around the text, as well as the project itself. Retro audience research generates not only data about the affective memories and critical reflections of informants but also insights into research methods and the production of new nostalgic subjects.

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