41 FILM QUARTERLY FROM BINGE-WATCHING TO BINGE-SCROLLING: TIKTOK AND THE RHYTHMS OF #LOCKDOWNLIFE Tina Kendall In a time when the health and safety of global popula- tions depends on a shared willingness to #StayTheFuck- Home, practices of binge-watching have taken on a series of strange new resonances. Amongst these is a surprising logic that has cast binge-watching as a form of civic duty in the context of COVID-19. The reinvention of the tele- visual binge as an expression of social solidarity has taken shape within a wider ecology of networked media forms and practices, which have similarly reinforced a relation- ship between staying home, staying connected, and stay- ing safe. At the heart of this new assemblage of networked viewing practices is the thorny problem of lockdown boredom. The popular short-form video social platform TikTok in particular has been constructed as the ideal antidote for COVID malaise, widely embraced as the Film Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 1, pp. 41–46. ISSN: 0015-1386 electronic ISSN: 1533- 8630 © 2021 by The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Reprints and Permissions web page, https://online.ucpress.edu/journals/pages/reprintspermissions. DOI: 10.1525/FQ.2021.75.1.41 Binge-watching as civic duty. Downloaded from http://online.ucpress.edu/fq/article-pdf/75/1/41/479837/fq.2021.75.1.41.pdf by Anglia Ruskin University user on 15 November 2022