John Menick “Binge responsibly” - Netflix advertising slogan Until recently media viewers were voyeurs, peeping at televisions and movie screens from a safe distance, their gaze conceptualized as a psychosexual form of mastery. But voyeurism as a model is no longer adequate to understand how viewers consume media. Viewership is no longer distant and controlling. Rather, the contemporary viewer is an addict, and their drug of choice is the image. The mode of desire for the addict-viewer is more: more films, more TV, more clicks, more downloads, more levels, more seasons, more episodes. Unlike scopophilic sadists, today’s viewer-addicts give up control, perhaps even lose control, helplessly spending long nights bent over laptops and tablets, clicking “watch next episode” until dawn. Images are no longer scarce, and the moreish addict-viewer is, in part, a product of this post-scarcity image economy. There is always another season to watch, another show to get into, another streaming service to sign up for, and the viewer is potentially immobilized before all of the choices. (Netflix calls this problem of too much choice “decision fatigue.”) For viewer-addicts, scopophilia has become scopomania, with extreme viewing habits comparable to binging on food or narcotics. (The word “binging” itself, when referring to watching television shows for long periods of time, was borrowed from addiction lingo, replacing the more athletic “marathoning.”)
John Menick: The Narco-Image
John Menick: The Narco-Image
John Menick: The Narco-Image
John Menick “Binge responsibly” - Netflix advertising slogan Until recently media viewers were voyeurs, peeping at televisions and movie screens from a safe distance, their gaze conceptualized as a psychosexual form of mastery. But voyeurism as a model is no longer adequate to understand how viewers consume media. Viewership is no longer distant and controlling. Rather, the contemporary viewer is an addict, and their drug of choice is the image. The mode of desire for the addict-viewer is more: more films, more TV, more clicks, more downloads, more levels, more seasons, more episodes. Unlike scopophilic sadists, today’s viewer-addicts give up control, perhaps even lose control, helplessly spending long nights bent over laptops and tablets, clicking “watch next episode” until dawn. Images are no longer scarce, and the moreish addict-viewer is, in part, a product of this post-scarcity image economy. There is always another season to watch, another show to get into, another streaming service to sign up for, and the viewer is potentially immobilized before all of the choices. (Netflix calls this problem of too much choice “decision fatigue.”) For viewer-addicts, scopophilia has become scopomania, with extreme viewing habits comparable to binging on food or narcotics. (The word “binging” itself, when referring to watching television shows for long periods of time, was borrowed from addiction lingo, replacing the more athletic “marathoning.”)