88% of Americans use a second screen while watching TV
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
> The more I consume, the more I need to consume, the more bored I feel. I often turn to video games to release the tension. I can spend two solid hours shooting at virtual objects until I start to feel less entertained. I then find myself pulling up my phone closer to consume more scrollable content while still playing the game. Only when all my sense are stimulated at the same time, I feel relieved.
> This becomes the new norm. Anything less will result in that acute sense of boredom. Have a conversation with a friend, you'll feel bored. They can't possibly compete with a video game, a political rant and a funny video at the same time. Right in the middle of a conversation you hear that familiar beep from your phone and you have to pick it up. It's not that you ignore your friends, or the dinner conversation, it's that you need to have them all occur at the same time to feel normal.
It was very zen and relaxing, to the point where I did it with other shows and games. For example, Dynasty Warriors 4 on a PS2 emulator, with NewsRadio reruns playing on the other half.
For some people it's just relaxing, not really about boredom.
It's no different than knitting or solving a crossword while listening to the radio 100 years ago.
The only problem is that I only have one more DS and GBA Castlevania game before I've beaten all of them. I've already worked through every Metroid and 2D Zelda game as well as Hollow Knight.
The pickings are getting slim.
I felt very similar, like it was a zen feeling. I didn't get a similar feeling with another game until Minecraft, where I could just carve out giant holes in the land while watching TV shows.
There was a point in our collective history when "where will my next meal come from?" is the overarching concern of every member of the species. Becoming a producer in such an environment would be nearly unthinkable, yet it's not a second thought today.
Cursory googling indicates hours weren't all that different.
One anecdote: I visited the (replica of) Chauvet Cave, in France, a few months ago, in which some of the best-preserved cave paintings in the world can be seen. They were painted around 30000 years ago from now by the Aurignacian, people very similar to us modern humans, including in height. We were told that they would spent only 4 to 5 hours a day hunting or gathering the necessary raw materials to survive. The rest of the time could be dedicated to the making of splendid clothes, a large variety af daily items, art, etc.
Edit: relevant wikipedia pages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chauvet_Cave , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aurignacian
No electricity, no antibiotics, no cars or planes or trains (maybe early ones, but not widespread). No thank you!
Could you elaborate?
When watching something on television with family or friends, if a question ever comes up about how something works (what it does, or what it is) that may not be made clear by the show, looking it up on another screen (e.g. mobile device) can lead to a much deeper conversation and better enjoyment of the subject matter. It can also lead to conversations afterwards discussing what we watched in greater detail than if we knew only what was presented in the show.
As an example that happened to me over the holidays, I was watching Alaska Aircrash Investigations with my parents as my mother has a fascination with investigative things, and she spent part of the time on her tablet looking up information on the NTSB staff in the show and, occasionally, some of the accident reports (if she could find them). This lead to both an interesting series of conversations about the people involved and greater appreciation for the program since we collectively knew more about the investigators and their backgrounds.
Tangentially, this is also why I think streaming YouTube to a television is such a beautiful thing (sometimes having the comments on a second screen while watching can be hilarious or depressing).
But I don't (seem to) have that need for sensory saturation with other activities. I have no problem just sitting down to read for hours.
I am fine with your other examples but do people really do this?
I always had the tv OR radio on while doing other things, but the idea of having both on at the same time seems incredibly strange to me.
I'd argue that it's a known fact, at least for anybody that follows any mainstream sport, that sports radio commentary is a lot more exciting that its tv counterpart.
Has anyone here actually watched Nielsen TV recently? This is the oldschool stuff. Comcast. Not netflix/hulu/Disney. The commercials are INSANE. I stopped watching sitcoms a few years ago when they switched to 21 minute shows. A third of primetime content is now ads. For reruns, thanks to compression tech/editing, ads are on the screen almost half the time. And those ads are ALL for old people. Diabetic testing supplies. Laxatives. Investment consulting. Erectile dysfunction. Medicare part B. Incontinence products. That's what the second screen is for: To distract one's self until the animated colon commercial goes away.
Considering it's basically a live music video, there's no reason why you wouldn't browse the internet at the same time.
I find this a weird take because we're in a renaissance of quality story telling TV right now. Keeping in mind Sturgeon's Law, only 66% of tv being crap is a win.
Not on broadcast television, which is what OP was referring to. It’s all monster of the week procedurals, low effort sitcoms, and reality garbage.
You could once tell a thrilling serial (whether it's crime drama, or sci-fi) within TV-14 guidelines that many people will watch, but now people expect more grit I guess. They want more gut-wrenching violence or adult language that feels more real and doesn't hold back.
There is no middle ground any more. it is either cheap simi-scripted reality series, music/tallent shows, and game shows or high budget prestige dramas.
this is a classic problem with long running tv shows. it's hard to get the pacing right when you don't know in advance how many seasons you're going to make.
GoT took a nose dive when they stopped having source material to work off of. It became stupid, mindless drama. People talk about the ending as if that's where the problems started. No, the writing was crap for the last several seasons.
The latest season of The Expanse was disappointing. It went from a slow burning, character driven series to an action packed run-of-the-mill drama laden mess, like most of the television shows you see nowadays. I'm happy Amazon picked it up, but they basically butchered the show, it will never live up to its potential.
Everything just kind of becomes samey because they're all learning how to do it from the same sources, and the lessons they're learning is unnecessary drama pulls people in and keeps them there. Except it drives me nuts when an entire season's worth of plot points could literally evaporate if character A articulated why they were angry at character B, who would then explain it was a misunderstanding.
Also, Chernobyl was fantastic and Watchmen was delightful, for the most part. And Evil is an interesting supernatural/cutting edge Tech mix. Then there’s the final season of Mr. Robot.
Actually I am thinking that the Expanse in general is a series where the screenwriters are outperforming the original authors.
Season 4 was always gonna be trouble, and I suspect that contributed to SyFy cancelling it.
Is it that major media conglomerates allocating less budget on their broadcast TV business and more into their movies and subscription based business models?
My other guess is that content restrictions of broadcast TV are now really holding it back.
The slow decline that started with The Real World had picked up pace, and the airwaves were slowly filling with reality show after reality show.
Then Lost went on the air, and nobody noticed at first, but by Season 2 it had competition from story-driven shows again. And I dunno who rushed out Lost Season 1 on DVD a few months before the second season aired, but that was an inspired decision. Tons of new viewers for Season 2, and probably for the first time ever people were binge-watching a TV show.
It ended with a whimper, but boy did it start with a bang.
Lost got some crazy publicity (for the time) as well: Lots of people thought the shot of the plane from the inside being torn in two was real, not from a TV show.
That is not a new thing. 21 min has been the norm for decades.
21-23 minute shows is the standard run time for a half hour block.
Every once in a while I experience regular television at someone's house and it always blows me away that people are ok watching something and being interrupted constantly while doing it.
I've been told cable now has commercials, which cracks me up since the advantage of cable used to be not having commercials because you paid for it.
1. start OS updates
2. install FF if it's not installed (aka if its windows)
3. install ublock origin
I'm grateful there are people who take the hit and keep the internet free for people like me, but I could never deal with those ads.
Commercials had invaded Cable TV thoroughly, well before the 2000s. I know it was 20 years ago, but I'd be surprised for someone to forget about the existence of commercials.
Today's are much more intrusive, however.
Too bad new issues of content fragmentation are developing in its place - I’m at least thankful Apple is starting to tackle it with “channels” in the Apple TV app and hardware, I still have to juggle subscriptions but at least I have a consistent interface to all of them.
Netflix, Hulu, YouTube TV, and Amazon Prime are all tracked by Nielsen, which deployed tracking of streaming platforms starting in 2017.
Source: A company I used to work for did a metric buttload of research on this subject.
Then they are only using the handheld (or laptop) screen, and they are not watching the TV
Most television and film content is just unbelievably boring, self-important, and undemanding of the viewer's attention. Frankly, content producers have become more and more disrespectful of the viewer's time.
In very rare cases, I suddenly notice I've lost track of the plot--if that happens a couple times, that's when I know I need to put away my phone/laptop and focus on the show.
It is not obvious which content is actually demanding. For example, the film The Martian was very dense and demanding of attention, while the more recent Ad Astra could be summarized with the single sentence "sad sack mopes around space." Dialog rich comedy is generally the most demanding.
Really? I find that the easiest to just listen to, especially once I know who all the characters are.
Generally it's not important what they're doing, just what they're saying, so I can just listen while doing other things.
Like the shows I relisten to all the time (not watch) while working on the computer are Newsradio, Corner Gas, Larry Sanders, Mr. Show, Red Dwarf, Scrubs, Psych, Arrested Development, Mighty Boosh, Flight of the Conchords, Yes Minister, Mitchell and Webb Look, and a more recent addition, Letterkenny. Pretty much none of that requires my visual attention, except to know that there's a visual gag here or there.
Granted, I usually paid attention the first time I watched it, but not on the rewatch.
I was watching a movie the other night and there was an uncredited cameo and it's still bugging me because I can't seem to figure out where I've seen him before.
We find there are two kinds of movies/TV: stuff that's kinda just relaxing and during which you can browse twitter or whatever, and stuff that's more serious where you can't really multitask without missing important aspects of the show, either because of the filming style or the density of the material or the pace of events or whatever.
The canonical example of the latter is The Wire. More recently, I'd put The Crown or Watchmen in this category. For the former, well, pretty much any traditional network show counts.
However, even in high-attention programming, it's pretty common for one of us to pause the show and check a screen to verify where we saw a given actor before, or look up a related bit of information (e.g., during the Crown, we often check on historical context).
I feel like a junkie saying this but maybe TV alone isn’t enough stimulation.
Maybe a better example is a podcast vs. music. You don't really need to absorb, consciously, every note and lyric of a song. But a podcast demands your attention.
Lately since Disney+ launched that’s been episodes of The Simpson’s for me. I’ve seen all the early stuff enough that I don’t need to give it anywhere near my full attention to still enjoy it and occasionally chuckle while I’m writing an email or putting together some low complexity code.
Before we had screens, we had newspapers, magazines and coffee table books. I remember this happening quite a bit when watching TVs prior to second screens even existing.
I think a lot of people feel this way, and not to place too much faith in TV show writers but this seems like a shame as it limits what experiences can be delivered by the medium.
This is exactly what has happened with movies, as well. At some point in the 2010's I noticed that in many movies I watched almost every shot was in motion. No moment of stillness or quieter reflection, just constant noise and motion, even in movies I thought were particularly good like the new Mad Max movie.
I think it's essentially a battle being fought between screens: the movie can't let the modern audience's attention waver for even a second, otherwise they might look down at their "second screen", lose track of the plot and consequently believe the movie wasn't that great.
This sucks because restful or reflective moments can give you a sense of sheltering, or the calm before a storm (for example), but you just can't get that feeling without moments where the camera calms down and people stop shouting.
Moreover, I prefer to watch with subtitles because I feel like I absorb information drastically better if I read it. On that point, I pretty much hate watching YouTube videos to learn anything - I’d rather read the docs and my favorite sources tend to be things like a programming language’s official documentation or the manual for whatever software I’m using (Logic Pro X comes to mind - I’d much rather read factual, authoritative text on a feature than watch some random YouTuber talk for 10 minutes and try to get me to subscribe to his or her channel while I could have easily read the docs in half the time). I think a big part of this “text vs video/audio” learning dilemma is that you can’t easily skim a videos contents and intuitively know what to skip and what parts are interesting. Text will always have its place.
The only scenario where i would prefer videos for learning something are when the material is very short in length and very single-minded, like “explaining how that one specific formula works and how it is used for that one specific application and why” or when i need to fill a small gap in my knowledge of something. And even then, there is some potential for the creator of such video to misuse the video and pad it with fluff and poor narration, though this is not unique to video as a medium and can be done in a text-based material as well.
Not accounting for some specific types of things (e.g., I cannot for the life of me learn intricate details of operating physical things like fixing something on a motorcycle without a video, despite heavily preferring written sources for learning otherwise), the general preference for learning through youtube vs. reading seems to come down (at least from what I've observed) purely to the individual's own preference.
[0]https://www.marketplace.org/2018/04/30/television-too-many-c...
Take late night talk show hosts' shows for example.
Ill watch the monologue of the shows and thats it. Most times - I will just watch the clip on youtube. I dont give a shit about which actor is promoting their crap, or what musician is going to perform a song.
I get the same jokes told in a slightly different angle from Colbert, Kimmel, Meyers, Noah, etc... and I get all their propaganda angles from both sides in short order.
Whats worse is that people like Bill Meyer are so freaking smug about their "unique" perspective....
Its all garbage.
The news is even worse than the "comedy" -- reality is a freaking joke.
And I'm sure you're probably aware of it, but you're not getting "both sides" from the hosts you've listed.
Just that the late night shows dont usually have a bunch of pro-trump comedy...
Regardless, its all garbage.
The weird part is that when he gets into bantering with the other cast members (miming stuff at the desk, exchanging dumb jokes, etc), he's really, really entertaining to me in a way that the rest of the show doesn't manage at all, and yet he barely does it.
If you can't see the bias in The Daily Show etc, Bill Maher might be a good stepping stone.
I've been watching the last season of Mr Robot on Amazon (and my god is it a cracker). As soon as I went to reddit to check out the fanbase reaction, so many of the posts were about how the vibe was ruined by ads appearing so often. But for me...it was a solid 50 minutes of TV, completely uninterrupted. I imagine those who enjoyed The Expanse on cable are now delighted about season 4 being a pure continuous stream on Amazon. I was.
Of course, you still get the blatant product placement. Death Stranding is my recent fave example for that, where you get Monster energy cans rubbed in your face. Same as with the old Splinter Cell games you'd be climbing across a massive billboard advertising Axe body spray.
I think the US has a serious problem with its special blend of capitalism, individualism, and consumerism. Everybody is out there to get something from you.
This hasn't been true for shows I'm interested in for a long time, and to be honest I kind of miss it. Especially for shows that used to have longer runs but are now shorter, the pacing seems off. There used to be a season-wide arc alongside individual episodes that may or may not have anything to do with that arc in particular.
You might say that episodes that don't tie into the season are filler, and I get where you're coming from. But in sci-fi specifically, I'm so sick of the trope of "there's a thing that threatens the very fabric of the universe", and literally everything the main characters do between learning about it and resolving it are related. I miss lower stakes episodes that balance out the larger stakes in the overall season.
I'm thinking specifically of Doctor Who in that last paragraph. (which to be fair is not US TV, but I can name some US/Canadian shows that took a similar route) It used to be that the doctor could have a romp around a new planet or an interesting period in history, the doctor or his companions would learn something new, and then they'd move on. Those kinds of one-offs are what the show is built around IMO. But now with fewer episodes every season, the very fabric of the universe is always threatened, and every companion is the most important person ever born, and everything you see on screen reinforces those two ideas. They keep mentioning adventures off-screen, I think because the writers recognize that they're losing something by not having those unrelated adventures happen where the audience can see.
(The latest season of Doctor Who is at least a step back from that, but it had plenty of its own problems, not least of which is a very crowded main cast that ended up underdeveloped as a result. The only character that I felt was interesting in the first episode didn't make it to the main crew, which is probably why they were developed so much better than the rest.)
This made me think of “The Mandalorian”. An 8 episode “season”, and a good half of the episodes were unrelated to the main story arc. Is this a good thing or not? It’s hard to say. I don’t feel terribly attached to the show, frankly.
If I watch broadcast TV it's through my DVR and I skip commercials.
Pretty much the only live TV I watch is sports and there's a lot of advertising there.
I'd argue that TV isn't trash though. There's an unbelievable amount of stuff being made and it isn't hard to find something great to watch. My to-watch list still has Sopranos, The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mr Robot, Westworld S2, Game of Thrones, and about 20 other series on it.
A number of apps developed to do just this have come and gone, but none seem to have succeeded.
Oh sorry, let's get back to the "correct" behavior of sitting still watching a screen with no interaction.
The author seems aware that this opinion is elitist. But the idea that putting on a TV as background noise is somehow wasting the planets resources... I mean, but why not compare it to other things you can be doing? Driving a car... Or traveling to a far off country... Using a phone while a TV is on has got to be one of the least pollutant activities a person can spend their time doing.
I think this is an interesting transition period for the art and artists.
When we detect a commercial on the TV for a brand, we run instantly ads on Facebook for the same brand.
Myself, I'm going to add this to my ever-growing article about negative impacts of advertising.
How exactly? Is the app always listening?
Then you still get all plot information, but do not become bored
Actually, now I have trouble listening to speeches or tutorials at normal speeds.
Also, people want to do something with their hands while watching things, and not everyone knits or (especially, these day) smokes, or pops popcorn before every movie they watch at home. Bet a huge percentage does something else while watching TV/movies. Sudoku books, whatever.
I live in the city now, and city background certainly doesn't bother me. But I don't feel a desire to artificially adding more.
Is silence that bad?
As to why people started doing that to begin with: dunno. Sports being on often, so having the TV on just becomes normal? Not sure.
Like many social behaviors, you could map it pretty well to one or more Fussellian class, in the US at least.
At the risk of sounding bougie, it seems kind of trashy to me to just constantly keep the TV on. Echoes of 1984's mandatory viewing, coupled with ignorance of advertising's effect on your brain.
But I've certainly observed that people fall fairly heavily into one category or the other. Either they can't stand it not being on, or they can't stand it being on.
The closest I can come to explaining where my distaste seems to come from is wasted opportunity.
In the modern era, we have unrivaled access to the thing (e.g. the musical piece, specific performance, news report, piece of information, best show or movie of all time) itself. And yet we're so in need of filler that we're willing to put any damn thing on?
That seems close to it, as I don't have nearly the adverse gut reaction to music as I do to television. Or even to television-sans-ads to television-with-ads.
“I haven’t owned a TV in 10 years. Does anyone still watch TV”?
But more to the point. Between Netflix, Hulu with No Commercials, Amazon Prime Video, and occasionally CBS All Access w/no commercials and STARZ, I hardly ever see commercially.
This probably isn't healthy but it's the easy coping mechanism for the problem of not socializing enough.
This is at least partially related to my own difficulties in directing my attention. What I can’t hear can’t distract me from what I want to be focusing on. Music is also good for this.
On the other hand, I've also noticed when watching movies on my computer (which is pretty much how I do it anymore), it can be really easy to get distracted.
On the gripping hand, when I watch shows on Amazon Prime, I generally don't have any difficulty watching through an entire episode without getting distracted. Possibly because I usually watch Prime on my tablet, where it's (a little) harder to switch between apps.
Recently I watched The Irishman (3.5 hours) at the theatre. Since the reviews mentioned the sombre mood of the film (unlike Scorcese's other gangter films), I was fully expecting to fidget around after some time.
I had no trouble with my attention span throughout the film so full credits to Scorcese and Thelma Schoonmaker for superb pacing. The audience was quite sparse and mostly film fans so I was able to watch it in a quiet atmosphere with occasional applause. In other words, the perfect movie watching experience.
If not at the theatre, I would have caught this at home. I would have taken more than 5 hours to complete the film. Numerous pauses throughout the film for bathroom breaks, googling names and trivia, simply getting distracted etc.
Now sometimes, you watch a movie that has a mind blowing twist, or something happens in the film that makes you go WTF and pause. Even then, you have to admit that watching the same film in the theatre (where you cannot just pause and take it in), with an audience who are going through the same thing, will probably be a better experience.
Once I caught myself doing this enough times, of course I just canceled the cable subscription, but a lot of my family members still seem to do this. At my parent's house, Law and Order marathons are essentially their choice of background noise. They rarely seem to sit down to watch a show on purpose.
If you don't mind me prying (I'm honestly fascinated), does it feel different watching while not having that simultaneous feed? If so, how?
In the same vein, I have to consciously avoid taking my phone out while sitting at a stop light or going to the bathroom
It didn’t used to be this way and I hate it
A particular friend will have the game, youtube playing, and also be betting on online poker on his phone.
Then there's background watching, which usually means re-watching something I've already watched. I'm almost always using a second screen during this time. This is probably more like 15-25 hours every week, maybe even more when I work from home. I get a significant amount of my work/chores/tasks done during this time.
This is definitely not just boredom or background noise TV. It seems that more and more frequently people are unable to maintain singular uninterrupted focus or attention on something without staring at phones or laptops.
I actually started to pay attention to this because it started to get on my nerves when people in cinemas were doing it, and it even seems to happen more and more in actual in-person conversations. The next time you go to a coffee shop or a bar pay attention to how often people in discussions with each other go for their phone and interrupt each other. It's pretty sobering.
Personally I had an epiphany about this years ago when I started checking mail and Reddit when I was sitting down to read fiction and I was so embarrassed because I was less able to read than my teenage self when I could sit down and read for a whole day, and I just felt like the fat people in Wall-E.
This. The internet (and thus phones) has matured into a platform for behavioral addiction. Even if we want what's on the main screen, our brains need to interface with the second screen with an alarming degree of regularity.
I always think to this Mitchell and Webb gift shop sketch that parodies the worst of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MFtl2XXnUc
Don't worry, we, unlike machines are still capable of doing that
Just wait until AI puts likenesses of ourselves and our social circles into the stories.
My primary focus is on several other computer screens.
There have never been more terrible shows to watch than there are today.
Inverted: excessively slow software builds. :)
New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1909301?query=fe...