Ah, binge-watching. Who among us has not experienced the sheer joy of discovering a great TV show on Netflix? Before you know it, you’ve watched all seven seasons, two weeks of your life have gone by and you’ve only emerged from your dorm room for the occasional snack. Forget class, you have to find out A’s true identity! One of my friends actually watched all nine seasons of “How I Met Your Mother” in under three weeks. I’m not sure how she fit in showering and school during that time, but I chose not to ask.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary, binge-watching means to “watch multiple episodes of a television program in rapid succession, typically by means of DVDs or digital streaming.” Binge-watching is becoming increasingly popular on college campuses as a way to relieve stress and temporarily escape reality. At Ohio University, students petitioned the administration to improve streaming speeds, using the motto: “Give us our Netflix back.” The administration responded by increasing the bandwidth from 50 megabits per second to 200 megabits per second.
In addition to Netflix, streaming services like Amazon, Hulu, and Sidereel offer hundreds of TV shows to binge-watch. In order to keep up with the growing demand, cable TV provider Time Warner plans to release entire seasons as opposed to individual episodes so that subscribers can binge-watch their favorite shows.
On Jan. 19, Netflix released a letter stating that viewers watched 42.5 billion hours of TV in 2015, compared to 29 billion hours in 2014. Netflix membership also increased from 57 to 75 million people. Another survey revealed that 61 percent of Netflix members engage in binge-watching. TiVo’s 2015 Binge Viewing Survey (yes, it’s a real thing) found that nine out of 10 people admitted to binge-watching at some point.
Interestingly, binge-watching is not just an American phenomenon. A study in the UK found that 52 percent of people watch TV for more than three hours at a time, and 10 percent of men report watching more than eight hours at a time. In addition, 28 percent of people say they would rather watch TV than spend time with their significant other.
Given the increasing popularity of binge-watching, researchers at the University of Texas were curious to see whether it's associated with any detrimental psychological or physical effects. In 2015, Yoon Hi Sung, Eun Yeon Kung and professor Wei-Na Lee found that binge-watching TV is correlated with depression, obesity, social isolation and poor impulse control. Although the study was correlational and not causal, the results are still quite revealing. A 2014 study by the American Heart Association also found that watching TV for more than three hours a day can increase the likelihood of premature death.
Besides the health risks, watching too much TV can interfere with school work and make it harder for people to resist procrastinating. How many of us tell ourselves, “Just one more episode, then I’ll get started on that paper.” Yet often, the best intentions go awry, and we find ourselves scrambling at the last minute to throw together a somewhat coherent paper.
So before you watch all 11 seasons of “Grey’s Anatomy,” try to limit yourself to one or two episodes a day. Look at it this way: it’ll take you a lot longer to run out of new episodes.
