Are You Still Watching? Second Screen Viewing and the Attention Economy
Let’s face it: attention is one of the most valuable resources that companies are honing in on. The world is constantly drowning in entertainment and information at every corner, so it makes sense that people are finding it more and more difficult to concentrate on a single task. As screens take over our lives, there seems to be some sort of hierarchy establishing itself. Cell phones are rising to the top while television is slowly sinking to the bottom. Why is that?
Second Screen Viewing
“Second Screen Viewing” is the idea that streamers must accommodate the viewers who are only paying half-attention by adopting a simplistic writing style. Social media encourages the practice of casual viewing because even if someone isn’t fully concentrated on what they’re consuming, at least they’re still scrolling. Putting on a YouTube video or a show in the background is common practice, so streaming services that rely on consumers watching their content for hours on end must compete with this phenomenon. Their solution? Limiting the complexity of their shows and movies, thus leading to lackluster storytelling. Streamers don’t want to risk people getting frustrated by a complicated plot and tuning out to go scroll online. Companies believe that it is necessary to spoon-feed exposition and plot points to their audience so they can keep them watching without disrupting their precious doomscrolling time.
To really show just how pervasive this is, filmmaker and author Justine Bateman did an interview with The Hollywood Reporter and made multiple interesting points about the future of AI in the film industry, and confronted the notion of second-screen viewing:
“I’ve heard from showrunners who are given notes from the streamers that “This isn’t second screen enough.” Meaning, the viewer’s primary screen is their phone, not the laptop, and they don’t want anything on your show to distract them from their primary screen because if they get distracted, they might look up, be confused, and go turn it off. I heard somebody use this term before: they want a “visual muzak.” When showrunners are getting notes like that, are they able to do their best work? No.”
The Attention Economy
Hebert A. Simon was the first to theorize the concept of the “attention economy” in 1971, and it is more relevant today than ever.
This concept is directly tied to the idea of “time stress”. Time is a scarce resource, so every sector of the economy and its consumers must think about where to allocate their energy. Every person on planet Earth wishes to spend their time in the best way possible to maximize their happiness in the finite amount of days they have left. Time is just as precious as money.
“In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence, a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it” (Simon, 1971).
Reading books, doing a hobby, and watching a good movie just don’t compare to the instant dopamine hit people get when scrolling on their social media feeds. People are inclined to take the easy way out, despite the unproductive nature of this method. However, movie and TV lovers still yearn for rich and immersive content such as iconic 2000’s shows like Sex and the City, Breaking Bad, and The Sopranos. Is it fair for TV producers to go the “safe” route while neglecting their stories and their loyal fans?
The average Netflix show is 9 hours, and a human’s average attention span is 8.25 seconds. So, trying to sell long-form content to someone who has a shorter attention span than a goldfish can be quite difficult. But does that justify “second screen viewing”?
Sources
- https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/tv/tv-news/tvs-top-5-podcast-justine-bateman-ai-dangers-hollywood-1235540858/
- https://academic.oup.com/iwc/article/37/1/18/7733851 (Interacting with Computers, Volume 37, Issue 1, January 2025, Pages 18–29, https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwae035)
- https://thecreativegood.substack.com/p/what-is-second-screening-and-why?r=2l9x0w&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
- https://www.thetreetop.com/statistics/average-human-attention-span
