Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Faced with an ever-expanding smorgasbord of television, video and music programs, are we in danger of a new kind of gluttony? Michelle Griffin reports.

AS SOON as I finished watching the season one finale of Veronica Mars on Channel Ten, I went online and bought the second season on DVD from Amazon. My favourite show had been shunted to the fag-end of Friday nights, and I didn’t know when the show might be aired again.

As it happened, new episodes screened on Ten, unpromoted, in weeks, but by then I had my six-DVD fix of the next 22 episodes. What followed wasn’t pretty: I watched more than 18 hours of the show in three weeks, alone, and often on the DVD drive on my computer. My weekly treat had become a binge.

I’m not alone. DVDs, high-definition digital recorders and internet-downloaded shows are changing the way many of us watch television. TV DVD titles, once a niche interest, have flooded the market in the past two years. In 2004, only 230 series were available on DVD in the US; this year there are more than 2000, and this doesn’t include the boom in British and Australian TV titles such as Bleak House or Fox8’s Love My Way.

Melbourne hair stylist Anthony Savage, 32, likes to rent TV serials from the video stores instead of movies, and then watch them in slabs, three or four episodes at a time.

His longest DVD marathon was seven hours of HBO’s neo-western Deadwood.

"When you watch it like that, you become completely involved," he says. He still finds it faintly embarrassing to admit. "I feel a little strange telling people. They can look at you funny."

But overdosing on DVDs is hardly an obscure vice. According to The New York Times, it’s the DVD sales -$US200 million ($263 million) since 2002 - not the ratings that keeps Keifer Sutherland’s star vehicle in production. Melbourne engineer Tony Russo is only one of many local fans of 24 who admits to watching as many hours of the real-time thriller as he can in one go. His best is eight hours. "You can’t help yourself," he says. "You think one more episode, but it keeps you hungry."

I know what he means. I kept thinking "one more episode", even when Veronica Mars’ scriptwriters taunted me by writing in a joke about binge-watching. Just like scoffing all the chocolate biscuits in a pack, it made me feel a little queasy. This was in part because marathon viewing exposed holes in the plot that I might have forgiven if the series had been doled out in weekly portions. But also, I wondered if it was bad for me.

According to psychologist Andrew Campbell, I don’t have a problem. Yet. So long as I don’t start walking the corridors in slow motion while humming the Mars theme tune ( We Used to be Friends by the Dandy Warhols), I’m OK.

A lecturer at the University of Sydney, Dr Campbell is Australia’s foremost expert on cyber-psychology. "I wouldn’t call that behaviour bingeing," he says. And then tells his own story.

"I bought series seven of The West Wing and watched it for two days straight. I felt quite sated, and I don’t need to see it again for another 12 months. If a month from now I said I have to go and watch it all again ... that would be a problem."

He has seen a rise in the number of TV show obsessives, the kind who watch the shows, join the chat rooms, build the fan pages. It’s not just the dramas. Reality shows can trigger obsessions, he says, but they’re often short-lived. "People stay up all night to watch different versions of Big Brother, but if you look at the stats, most people drop off after three or four weeks."

Fans of cult shows such as Buffy can, he says, develop "fantasy-prone personality disorder", focusing everything on an alternative reality, becoming antisocial, and identifying with the characters.

Experts are divided on the harmful effects of consuming too much media. Many, including Campbell, distinguish between passive "lean-back media" such as television and recorded music, and interactive "lean-forward media", such as electronic games and internet sites. Games and websites have been found to be far more addictive than the small screen.

This would suggest that notoriously "sticky" sites such as YouTube, MySpace and Facebook, which combine audio-visual materials with plenty of point-and-click interactivity, could be the crack cocaine of new media. The average YouTube browser clicks on 11 pages every time they visit the site. At Facebook, a hot new multimedia portal, the average viewer clicks on 33 pages before moving on.

Many research projects, including one published last week by the Stanford University school of medicine, identify internet obsession as a real addiction. (It found that one in eight Americans displayed at least one sign of internet abuse.)

Campbell is reluctant to call the internet addictive. "To be truly addictive, there has to be withdrawal, both physically and psychologically, and we haven’t seen evidence of that," he says.

What about our other new media toy, the mp3 player? We all know pod people, the kind who can spend entire days white-wired to their shuffle function.

Another study released last week by US audiologists Brian Fligor and Cory Portnuff reported that listening to loud music through earphones for more than 90 minutes a day could damage your hearing. Considering the iPod’s ubiquity, we could have an entire generation of the hearing-impaired. Then there’s the machine’s addictive qualities.

In his 2005 book iPod, Therefore I Am, Dylan Jones, the editor of British GQ, writes: "It has not only become my constant companion, but it’s something of an emotional crutch, too."

And in new iPod hagiography The Perfect Thing, Newsweek’s technology editor, Steven Levy, reports on the widespread belief in the shuffle function’s telepathic powers.

"Some people assumed their iPods not only played favourites but drew on mystical powers to choose their songs. ’Over the last couple of days that I’ve been (putting my library on shuffle), I may think of a certain song or band, and, lo and behold, that winds up being the next song or band played,’ writes a blogger named Kapgar. ’It’s like some sort of symbiotic relationship.’ "

Surely that’s fantasy-prone? iPods already play TV shows as well as music. If Apple can ever combine its machine with an internet-enabled mobile (a widely rumoured plan), many people will never turn it off.

Sydney-based writer and academic Mark Pesce is another new media expert who is also an enthusiastic consumer. "I spent three or four days watching 24," he says. "It was wonderful!" And yet, as a keen fan of Battlestar Galactica, he has started rationing himself to one episode a week. "I wanted to stretch out my enjoyment," he says. "I recently watched two episodes in a row and it was a huge temptation to go on."

With so much media on demand and at our fingertips these days, Pesce says we’re all going to have to learn how to restrain ourselves.

"Our media diet needs to be as rounded as our food diet," he says. "There’s always the temptation to consume junk all day. We need to learn how to pick and choose."