From Couch Potato to Binge-Viewer: The Reconstruction of Audience in Advertising Articulations Through Nostalgic Perversion

• In Event: ICA Interactive Paper/Poster Session II
  In Interactive Poster Session: Popular Communication Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

This paper is an exploration of the commercial promotion of binge-watching by media corporations. I analyzed 25 popular, online promotional videos through the lens of social memory to explore how these companies are constructing binge-viewers through the memories of 20th couch potatoes. My findings indicate that these commercials use nostalgia for 20th century public service announcements (PSAs) to paint fears of prolonged television consumption as outmoded through the rhetorical devices paromologia and reductio ad absurdum. In so doing these they fix the social memory of 20th century broadcast television outside of contemporary streaming video technology and binge-watching culture. This polemic use of memory serves to brand binge-viewers as culturally ambivalent, self-aware, and agentic, while reinforcing the contemporary narrative of TV’s “platinum age.” Furthermore, the use of nostalgia in these promos subverts convention and complicates the term’s articulation in memory studies.

Author

• Emil Steiner, Rowan University