What are we watching?

If you watch a film on a TV is it watching TV? If you watch a film on a computer monitor or smartphone is it watching TV?

Someone made this distinction recently, and I demurred: Surely watching a film is not the same as just watching TV. But the more I parse the semantics, the more I think they may be dissimilar activities, but only marginally.

And recently people have been pondering whether TV dramas are in fact better than film dramas. Why this confusion in the brain?

Merely looking at something does not mean it is being watched. Merely watching something does not necessarily mean it is fully perceived or comprehended. Watching assumes attention that has a tendency to drift or wander. To ask a human to watch one thing for long periods may induce sleep absent other activity in the brain. Photographers sometimes watch one thing for a long time and wait for the decisive moment to capture the image. There really is no one way that we watch things.

Screens aren't the only things we watch. Reading is not watching per se, although the brain projects images on itself that we watch and engage with intellectually. If a book is boring we stop perceiving it, and drift off to other more alluring reveries.But we are still seeing and watching the object.

The act of watching something in motion on a screen is mostly a passive activity--sitting alone on a couch in a living room. Some may be of the opinion that going to a movie theater is a more rewarding experience than watching the same film on a back-lit screen. There are some social aspects of merely being in the same room with other people, but movie theaters are typically passive social places, where talking is forbidden. TV allows for talking over video (for a better or for a worse experience)

So the larger question may be that rather than watching something passively, we want to engage in discourse about the content, and projecting our views rather than watching the distillation of views of the writer, director, editor and composer. That's decidedly TV. But if I watch TV alone, is that watching a film?