‘We Pay to Buy Ourselves’: Netflix, Spectators Streaming (original) (raw)
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The Convoluted Cinematic Experience in the Age of Netflix
New Review of Film and Television Studies (online blog, November 2022), 2022
This essay sketches the evolution of cinematic experience from the century of authentic film spectatorship based on the dark theater and big screen to the new age of digital interfaces and streaming platforms. Special attention is paid to the paradoxical performance of Netflix driving this shift. It challenged the notion of ‘what/where is cinema’ with films like Okja and Roma, and its docu-essay Voir even leads a critical discussion on cinema’s past and future outside the traditional territory of cinema. The Covid pandemic has only contributed to Netflix’s self-contradictory engagement with cinema as its original shows, such as Squid Game, cinematically critique global capitalism while enriching the platform giant’s market dominance. This ‘new normal’ demands a multilayered approach to today’s ‘Netflix-ised’ cinema.
Netflix, imagined affordances, and the illusion of control
final draft of a chapter in a book, 2018
This study uses various conceptual definitions of control as an analytical lens to explore the Netflix platform. We experiment with various questions of control to examine how control is enacted on Netflix, how it is embedded in different interface elements, and how it influences our experiences with and through the platform. Our analysis highlights how control on Netflix is never situated within a single entity. Instead, it is distributed and continuously reproduced in the process of interaction between different human and nonhuman entities within the sociotechnical Netflix experience. Ultimately, this study champions the idea of control as a sensemaking device, which can be used to analyze complex interaction processes in heavily-mediated environments, allowing us to continue past the now typical stopping point of saying infrastructures are simply entangled. It is a particular thread in the tangle we can pull on, to examine what’s going on, rhetorically or ideologically, within or because of the routines created through our everyday uses of platforms. official citation (please use :) Markham, A. N., Stavrova, S., & Schlüter, M. (2020). Netflix, imagined affordances, and the illusion of control. In Plothe, T., & Buck, A. (Eds.). Netflix at the Nexus: Content, Practice, and Production in the Age of Streaming Television (pp. 29-46). London: Peter Lang.
TV Got Better: Netflix's Original Programming Strategies and Binge Viewing
2015
This paper analyzes the promotional strategies of Netflix, arguing that the company reinforces what Pierre Bourdieu has called the discourses of distinction. In particular, the streaming service highlights what Tryon calls the promises of plenitude, participation, prestige, and personalization. Netflix highlights these discourses in part through its ongoing engagement with subscription cable channel HBO, and in part through promotional materials such as its TV Got Better campaign, which sought to naturalize viewing practices such as binge watching as being part of a technological and narrative cutting edge.
Netflix, the Curation of Taste and the Business of Diversification
STUDIA HUMANISTYCZNE AGH, 2021
Netflix is considered as a global business invested in strategies of diversification, localisation and personalisation in light of several discourses about the streaming service. One presents Netflix as an evil corporation encouraging binge-watching and reducing individuals to data. A utopian discourse proclaims the democratising potential of digital media technologies, including Netflix's claims about its personalised, on-demand service. An industry discourse laments Netflix's disruption of the film and television business. Finally, a scholarly discourse maps the political economy and cultural impact of Netflix. Each discourse attaches a particular cultural value to Netflix. Some offer 'antidotes', including the niche streamers, with their 'curated' collections of specialised content. Both types of streamer are in fact gatekeepers regulating access to cultural experiences and promoting particular ideas of taste and diversity. Netflix's strategies of customisation and glocalisation, and its activities in the Middle East and North Africa, demonstrate in the end that diversity is good for business.
SATS, 2021
Most online platforms are becoming increasingly algorithmically personalized. The question is if these practices are simply satisfying users preferences or if something is lost in this process. This article focuses on how to reconcile the personalization with the importance of being able to share cultural objects-including fiction-with others. In analyzing two concrete personalization examples from the streaming giant Netflix, several tendencies are observed. One is to isolate users and sometimes entirely eliminate shared world aspects. Another tendency is to blur the boundary between shared cultural objects and personalized content, which can be misleading and disorienting. A further tendency is for personalization algorithms to be optimized to deceptively prey on desires for content that mirrors one's own lived experience. Some specific-often minority targeting-"clickbait" practices received public blowback. These practices show disregard both for honest labeling and for our desires to have access and representation in a shared world. The article concludes that personalization tendencies are moving towards increasingly isolating and disorienting interfaces, but that platforms could be redesigned to support better social world orientation.
AUDIENCE CULTURE AND TV SERIES: NETFLIX AS A POPULAR CULTURAL PRACTICE
Begüm Tay, 2022
With the development of technology, television, which is the ultimate representation of mass media and indispensable for the domestic place has converged the digital media age. SVOD (Subscription video-on-demand) platforms and social media have become different mediums of mass communication in the contemporary world. With the entrance of Netflix, the most popular SVOD platform of the digital age, into daily life and domestic space, changes have occurred in the television culture of use by its audiences. This research aims to contribute to digital media approaches in the audience studies literature by examining the representation of Netflix culture of use in daily life, the changing television culture of use with Netflix, and the current position of television in the domestic space from an audiences' point of view. This is a qualitative and exploratory study, it is conducted by 14 participants by semi-structured in-depth interview technique. The critical discourse analysis method was used in data analysis to understand the audience's engagement with Netflix and television relationships.
2019
With the digitization of the entertainment industry, our everyday media encounters become increasingly data-saturated. In the framework of the digital attention economy, lifestyle technologies stimulate and modulate intensive participation on a regular basis. By conceptualizing the American streaming brand and content provider Netflix as a networked experiential environment, this article explores the practice of binge-watching in light of its multilayered possibilities for user engagement. With the focus on the affective entanglements of recommendation, attention, and attachment, the first part of the article foregrounds binge-watching as the main driving force behind Netflix’s promotional stance on personalization and quality. The second part provides a situated analysis on how binge-viewing technologies and bodies connect and disconnect by zooming in on users’ adaptations of the viral catchphrase “Netflix and chill” on Tumblr. Highlighting the embodied dynamics of engagement with today’s tech brands, I argue for thinking about the value of these dynamics as embedded in the digital logic of contact/capture.