Hanchard, M. orcid.org/0000-0003-2460-8638, Merrington, P. and Wessels, B. (2021) Screen choice : the relations, interactions and articulations of watching film. Open Screens, 4 (1). pp. 1-12.
Abstract
People watch films on televisions, laptops, tablets, smartphones, and cinema screens. As technologies, each of these screen types provide different opportunities to select particular films, and to choose when and where to watch them. This raises questions about how and why people choose particular screens and the viewing experiences they gain from doing so. To address these questions, we draw on 200 semi-structured interviews with film audience members in England. We use Livingstone’s (1998, 2013) notion of interactions and relations and Hartmann’s (2006) notion of a ‘triple articulation’ of media to approach screens as technologies that carry a particular range of films. Here, films are understood as texts, and each screen a medium that provides opportunities to watch films in specific temporal and spatial contexts. We find that people tend to: (1) watch films at the cinema, either to socialise or to feel part of an temporary auditorium-based community – whilst immersing within the text; (2) on television sets in the living-room to relax or socialise; (3) on laptops or tablets in the bedroom for personalised engagement; and (4) via smartphones for convenience and to pass time when away from home. Overall, we argue that people’s film-watching is embedded within specific contexts and that people choose particular screen types for the opportunities they offer for watching particular films in particular times and places. In this, people choose screen types and configure various temporal and spatial aspects of their film-watching environments to seek out specific viewing experiences.
Metadata
Item Type: | Article |
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Authors/Creators: |
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Copyright, Publisher and Additional Information: | © 2021 The Author(s). This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC-BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/. |
Keywords: | Film consumption; Screen studies; Triple articulation |
Dates: |
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Institution: | The University of Sheffield |
Academic Units: | The University of Sheffield > Faculty of Social Sciences (Sheffield) |
Funding Information: | Funder Grant number Arts and Humanities Research Council AH/P005780/2 |
Depositing User: | Symplectic Sheffield |
Date Deposited: | 23 Jun 2021 13:31 |
Last Modified: | 23 Jun 2021 13:57 |
Status: | Published |
Publisher: | Open Library of the Humanities |
Refereed: | Yes |
Identification Number: | 10.16995/os.35 |
Open Archives Initiative ID (OAI ID): | oai:eprints.whiterose.ac.uk:174973 |