New Media New Society?
Can’t Wait Till Next Week: Being a Binge-Watcher in the Age of New Media
Elif Kıran, Mehmet Güven AvcıThe tremendous developments in technology have been accompanied by changes in each and every corner of human life, including communication. Therefore, the fact that the rapid and huge transformation of media has become a point of attention is no surprise. The current version of media is called new media and bears several differences from traditional media all based on the digitalization era. This stream of change has been accompanied by numerous newly born media interaction behaviors, one of which is binge watching, which refers to watching several episodes of a television series or program in succession. This article aims to handle the issue of digital media product consumption in the world of new media from a sociological perspective by focusing on the social determinants of and motivations for watching series on digital platforms. To this aim, the paper draws a general framework of the fundamentals of new media blended with glimpses of consumer society and the age of speed. In order to support this theoretical view, the article conducts a field study using in-depth qualitative interviews with 10 people from different age groups. The data gathered from these interviews have been analyzed under three main themes: daily life practices and new media, forms of interaction with new media, and the general framework of binge-watching experiences.