They say our attention spans are shrinking. They say we cannot focus as long on reading. They say we have a harder time remembering facts.
Who are they? What gives them the authority to say these things? And, if all of this is true, then why are people spending more and more time sitting for long periods of time and focusing on television shows, or binge watching?
These are the questions that I hope to address in this project. I personally first encountered binge watching in high school, before my family had a Netflix account. My close friend and I watched Friends on DVD, since her family owned them all. We would go back and forth between her basement and my basement, watching episode after episode for hours. I was binge watching before I had ever heard the word.
Fast forward to college and binge watching is now a huge part of not only my life, but the culture that surrounds me here. I come home from a particularly stressful day of classes, meetings, work, and whatever else I have going on and just sit on my bed and watch episode after episode of whatever I'm watching at the time. I have my shows that I won't start in the middle of a semester because I know that, once I start, I won't be able to stop until it's over. Even right now, as I'm writing this, I would rather be watching the latest show I've started, accidentally beginning without realizing how quickly I'd be hooked and how compelled I'd feel to just continue watching until I run out of episodes.
I hear a lot about technology and how it is changing us in my studies as both a Comm Major and a Digital Studies Minor. That is where I first learned that technology is supposedly changing our attention spans. While I definitely see this happening in my life as I get more and more tired of reading long articles online and more drawn to sites like Buzzfeed that present articles in a much more visually pleasing way, I am confused by the idea that our attention spans are shrinking, yet we spend more and more time sitting in front our our computers and TVs, staring at the screen and taking in whatever we are watching for hours on end. This confuses me because I see it everyday and I am a part of it, part of the binge watching culture. I am personally invested in this because it is personal to me. When you binge watch, why is it that you can focus so much attention on watching? Does it take more of your attention than reading? Does it take less?