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Binge Watching TV Makes It Less Enjoyable, Study Says (vice.com)
According to new research by Jared Hovarth and his colleagues at the University of Melbourne, binging appears to diminish the quality of the television show for the viewer. From a report: This conclusion is based on a self-reported study incorporating 51 graduate and undergraduate students at the university, who were split into groups of 17 to watch a television show at different frequencies. One group watched the one-hour show on a weekly basis, another watched it on a daily basis, and another group consumed the first season of the show in one sitting, amounting to about 6 straight hours of TV. Each group was watching the highly acclaimed first season of the BBC Cold War-era drama The Game. The season consisted of six episodes, and none of the participants had previously seen the show. After finishing the season, all respondents filled out a questionnaire to gauge how well they understood the show. 24 hours later, they returned to the lab to take a retention quiz to see how well they could remember details from the show. As the researchers found, the mode of viewing had a significant effect on the study participants' ability to remember the show. For instance, binge-watchers had the strongest memory performance the day after watching the show, but this retention also had the sharpest decline over 140 days. Weekly viewers on the other hand, showed the weakest memory performance 24 hours after finishing the show, but also demonstrated the least amount of memory dilution over time.
Seriously,
How about a study with people who have jobs, kids and responsibilities and then see who enjoys binge watching vs waiting every week for the next episode.
Most people I know with busy lives actually just wait for the end of a season that plays weekly and then binge watch the whole season on a rainy day.
I know the parameters of the study are well identified in the article, but still, useless study is useless.
Because we will drop the sub after we watch the one show they have we want.
The rest of this study is irrelevant and honestly doesn't ring true. When a show is spread out too long I tend to lose much of the plot points due to other things going on in between. I tend to stop caring about some shows I might otherwise finish up. Possibly the last part of that sentence is the key point: when binge watching I might watch a show I'd ordinarily decide to give up on because it got stupid. When they're spaced a week apart I will just not bother to go back.
Damn blipverts erase your memory of the show when you bingewatch.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
What does retention have to do with enjoyment.
More over these retention numbers are what would be predicted by many other studies on memory that support shorter study periods and frequency as ways of boosting retention.
This just proves you remember things better if you spend more time thinking about them. The title is irrelevant to the summary.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
I would like to see this study re-done with commercials. So they picked a British TV show, presumably with the British style TV (no commercials until the end of the show). Give me an American style show, with 33% or more commercials in an hour and I bet you will get totally different results. This is why streaming and binging are huge in the US, as people can absorb the content, with out the BS Marketing.
That's the worst thing you saw in the study?
1 day after binge watching, you're testing their memory on details from yesterday. 1 day after the weekly group, you're asking them the same questions about details from 36 days ago. Do you remember details of a show you watched over a month ago as well as what you saw last night?
The whole study is fatally flawed.
Stuff that most people suspect.
However we came up with a process called Science, which collects data to show if our expectations match reality.
We live our lives with a huge set of what we call "truths" that we actually haven't proven, or measured. We live and make decisions based on our biases, and often base off of experience from extremely poor sample sizes.
For the most part we are able to live and be productive citizens with our untrue biases, and many of our unproven biases may actually be true as well. However if you are making decisions that can effect other people, putting your bias threw the scientific process, could be useful.
The net enjoyability from binge watching would intuitively say would be less then watching the show once a day or once a week, as our expectation of the next show will increase in the enjoyability. While binge watching, will get rid of the expectation, and also make watching TV more of a chore as we must see what is next. But that is my personal feelings. However a study can show if this is true or not.
This study brings up additional questions. If we find it less enjoyable then why do we do this. Are they other factors involved. What can be done to improve this?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
There is nothing scientific about a sample set of one show and a mere 51 students that makes any sort of conclusion, let alone sweeping conclusions about all watchers and shows. The anecdotal experience of anyone who consumes television is more significant than this study.
Not only that, the headline misleadingly uses the word "enjoy", but the study clearly looked at memory/understanding of the show, not enjoyment. So all they REALLY showed was that memories created during a 6 hour binge are not as lasting as those created over multiple exposures. In fact, what this study shows is more relevant to learning than to anything to do with enjoyment of tv shows. If you have a critical test the next day, binge learning is possible and will hold well for 24 hours... but if you need to actually remember the material at a time after the test, you need to constantly review the material.
If we MUST know how this study applies to TV shows, then what we learn is that binge watching a "season" of an annually released show will make it harder to follow the subsequent season because you've forgotten a lot. But that's what "Previously on [this show]..." recaps are for... and it would be helpful to study how well people did on these tests when shown a recap like that.
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I would completely disagree. I enjoy binge watching far more than having it doled out in a prescribed dose on a weekly basis. But that's neither here nor there, since the summary would suggest that they weren't testing "enjoyability" in the first place.
Rather, the researchers were testing retention, which is a wholly separate issue. Whether someone can remember an episode a week or two later is only weakly correlated to their enjoyment of it. My wife and I discovered The West Wing on Netflix maybe two weeks back. We're already most of the way through season 2 (despite Hurricane Harvey and a cross-country trip interfering with our binging), but the plot details for any given episode in season 1 have already faded quite a bit.
Does that mean I didn't enjoy them? That I would have enjoyed them more if they were doled out over a longer period of time? Hardly. While it's not much of an issue in a primetime show like The West Wing, niche shows that are more subtle in their storytelling are far more enjoyable when binge watched, because, as the researchers noted, you're more capable of recalling details that you saw more recently, enabling you to pick up on or even simply recognize the cues and references far more capably.
Plus, binge watching allows you to stay in the moment far better. For instance, I remember trying to keep up with a season of 24 in realtime by binge watching the entire season on a Saturday, and it was easily the most enjoyable way I watched any season of that show. When I watched episodes on a more sporadic basis it really pulled me out of the moment and made the show feel far less intense. It was, simply put, far less enjoyable. Even just watching 3-4 episodes at a time was better than one at a time, since it allowed the show to develop a cadence and rhythm.
You'll hear people who are engrossed in a good book talk about physically experiencing the chills or blasts of heat described in the book's setting. I've never experienced that personally, but my dad told me about the one time he had that happen to him: when he was first learning to speed read. It kept him so in the moment that he experienced the book in a way that was completely unlike how he had ever experienced one prior, making an otherwise fairly mediocre novel far more enjoyable than it otherwise would have been.
Binge watching is a similar sort of experience for most people, which, again, has very little to do with retention.
Not only that, the headline misleadingly uses the word "enjoy", but the study clearly looked at memory/understanding of the show, not enjoyment.
The summary is not the article! They did measure how much the viewers enjoyed the show. Surprise: Those that watched it daily liked it the most, those that watched in a single day, the least.