This is the presentation I gave at Streaming Television and Second Screening Workshop at Boston University a couple of days ago.
The opening couple of pages of the deck refer to the “bingeing” metaphor that I had felt had been used too liberally and not very critically at the conference the day before. People used “bingeing” is if this were the unexceptional and indeed the best way to characterize how we watch TV now. Weird, I thought. “Bingeing” is after all a meme that came spinning out of popular culture a couple of years ago. It is a very particular, very odd figure of speech. No one seemed to be “interrogating” it.
So those opening slides, now a little general, post a complaint. I wanted to suggest that “bingeing” may be a bad metaphor, and to propose another way of thinking about what is happening to TV and viewers. Call it binging and you miss almost all of this.