Rhythms and plasticity: television temporality at home

Abstract

Digital technologies have enabled new temporalities of media consumption in the home. Through a field study of home television viewing practices, we investigated temporal orderings of television watching. In contrast to traditional pictures of television use, our evidence suggests that rhythms across households play an important role in shaping television watching. Further, we found a flexibility and openness within the patterns of television viewing that we refer to as ''plasticity.'' Our data suggest that plasticity and rhythms co-exist and together compose the qualitative experience of domestic television time; an understanding of both aspects of temporality suggests an approach for the design of future television technologies.

"I Can Watch What I Want"

“…Irani et al [7] conducted a diary study of people's viewing habits. This study examined the temporality of viewing in 14 households, which included the use of time shift and early on-demand services.…”

“…For this analysis we consider each episode or separate video to a different item that is watched. Participants reported watching 481 items across 178 sessions; watching 2.7 items per session (SD = 2.7, range: [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. The largest number of items viewed in a single session was 20 YouTube videos over 90 minutes.…”

Making Time

“…Yet at the same time, it creates a sense of fluidity in daily temporal rhythms; it fits into people's practices by resonating with the ways in which time is used. While Rattenbury et al highlight web browsing as the perfect plastic activity, the concept has also been applied to television watching by Irani et al [20]. They observe that by choosing particular kinds of programs and utilizing features such as rewinding, skipping and watching on-demand, television can become temporally flexible.…”

“…Ten years later, Taylor and Harper's [50] descriptions of television use show how television continued to facilitate different means of spending time, from "switching on to switch off" when returning home from work, to engaged viewing later in the evening. [20] most recent positioning of television as plastic indicates the existence of temporal windows that anchor collective rhythms: people coordinate around digital television as well as broadcast television. The flexibility that the medium now supports suggests that technologies might be used to enable the building of personalised temporal infrastructures.…”

Contemporary meanings and experiences of television in the digital age

“…Television, leisure and generations share a polysemic condition /today: establishing with certainty where they start and where they end is problematic, while the meanings that subjects can derive from the constitutive nuclei of facts and events are always diverse, multiple and complex (Cesar et al 2008;Cuenca Amigo and Landabidea Urresti 2010;Irani et al 2010). …”