Chronic exposure to web-series & it's effects

Written by: MEHUL H. SADADIWALA CLASS OF 2023

PSYCHOLOGICAL & HEALTH RELATED CHANGES IN CHRONIC EXPOSURE TO WEB-SERIES The highlight of this blog is the psychological and physical health related changes that occur in youth on chronic exposure to web-series, how OTT platform contents influence us is something interesting that has been discussed in this blog

With wide access to limitless data, there has been an exponential rise of new mediums of entertainment, often going by the name of OTT platforms. These streaming platforms provide users with a huge variety of content which is tailored as per the likings of the masses. This content comes in forms of web series, which has found it's home amongst the youth that find the regular television shows boring, repetitive, and lacking originality; this subgroup prefers to watch content that has a lot of drama, comedy, action, romance, thrill, and more, which comes to them through these web series.

Other most important reason why such shows are highly popular amongst young subgroups is because they provide a great sense of originality and engagement but at the same time this unregulated content delivers vulgarity, explicit visuals, abusive language, which induces a sense of rebellion against the society in this vulnerable population. Therefore, although entertaining, it has a solid potential to attract the youth's attention and influence their immature mindsets on multiple layers.

This content has immense potential to influence social and political opinions, but with this blog I wish to discuss the psychological and health related impact of this mode of entertainment. While the quality and the representation of the content is highly debatable, let's try to break it down with evidence based studies done of the this topic and reach to a reasonable conclusion. I assume you might have heard in news room discussions or read on internet that a certain type of movie, games, or documentaries should be banned as they are influencing the mentality of some people which is causing a rise of riots, serial killings, school shooting and bombings and so on. Often due to such discussions a notion is built up that there might be an association between consumption of such provocative content and it translating to real life violence. So the question is, is it really possible to get influenced by TV Shows?

In news we frequently hear about interrogation details of criminals where they vividly describe how they got inspired by the protagonist of their favourite TV show and tried to emulate the same in real life as well. Recently I heard about a group of youngsters inspired by a web series on a popular OTT platform, premise of which was based on counterfeit currency. Similarly there have been many real life parallels based on popular web series about chemistry teacher turning into a drug lord, serial killers, bank heist and many others which went on to inspire many to follow similar strategies. A study conducted on how these dramatic shows that are based on real incidents can trigger the emotions of people regarding crime, and aggression. In conclusions it was found out that viewers usually end up admiring these fictional characters and tend to grow liking towards their certain traits by the time they end the show their favourite characters or their ideologies leave an indelible impression on viewer's thoughts. [1] These streaming platforms focus largely on the 'binge watching' model, which is clearly understandable through the screenplay which ends every episode in a cliff hanger, which creates this urge in viewer's minds to keep exploring what happened next. This generates more viewers and viewing hours and therefore greater revenues. It won't be wrong to label this model an 'addiction'.[2] Studies have suggested that binge watching is thought to be closely related to negative feelings. Many studies provided examples of research articles that provide correlation between binge watching, body dissatisfaction, sleeping disturbances academic loss, depressive symptoms and more.[3]

Due to such complex impact of binge watching such highly addictive mediums of entertainment the viewers often are unaware of the effects of this experience, as their grades suffer, detrimental effects on their social lives, and the composite health effects are determined to an extent by their bingewatching habit. Infact what really took me by surprise was when I read a new article on internet in which a CEO of a leading OTT platform claimed that the streaming giant’s biggest rivals aren’t other rival platforms, or YouTube or even traditional broadcasters, it's - SLEEP! According to him, human need for sleep is actually their biggest barrier. His words were, “You know, think about it, when you watch a show from Netflix and you get addicted to it, you stay up late at night,” he said. In the long term this can be worrying as these platforms can influence minds of naive and young individuals in many ways and although true but it's hard to believe that many poeple are living the life of a fictional character and they lose their sense of reality. What we experience in the course of our life is stored in our subconscious mind and we make decisions based on that memory and knowledge. This can have different results for different people. Therefore, it's important for the viewers to realize that they don't drift away too much from their mental and physical health while engaging with these shows.