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Debates about binge watching as an increasingly commonplace cultural practice linked to the changing interfaces of media consumption in the era of online technologies are now numerous (Brunsdon, 2010; Jenner, 2015; Matrix, 2014; Perks, 2015). However, these largely do not consider the psychodynamics at work in binge watching, paying little attention to the pleasures, gratifications, and experiences afforded to viewers who watch in this way. The now infamous strategies of “on-demand” streaming services such as Netflix include the construction of “taste communities” that drive content provision, the use of algorithms to harvest data on viewer interactions, and the development of tools such as “post-play” that entrench binge viewing habits by coaxing the viewer to stay with their selected show or with the audio-visual paratexts aligned with it.
The term “binge watching” connotes both gluttony and addiction, and media panics about the inherent dangers are commonplace. Newspaper articles pronounce that binge watching can give you cancer (because remaining sedentary for hours on end can lead to bowel and bladder problems), or even kill you (; Donnelly, 2016). Paradoxically, however, binge watching has also given rise to new forms of relatedness, offering opportunities to defend against intensified feelings of loneliness and isolation that emerge from mediated experience. The textures of emotional and psychological complexity in the binge viewing phenomenon are closely knotted together, requiring not only scientific but also ideological analysis: this form of media consumption is related to forms of subjectivity produced by late neoliberal capitalism, where the intensification of unregulated workdays, and the expansion of leisure time, is heralded so widely.
There is an important unconscious dimension to digital mediated experience and its entanglement with self-identity, and I argue that object relations psychoanalysis is key to understanding the inherent processes involved