in recent years I have seen more and more people using phones during content they actively sought out including their favourite tv shows. I have seen Game of Thrones fans staring at their phone while the newest episode was running, only to ask everyone else in the room what just happened five seconds later.
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.
> in recent years I have seen more and more people using phones during content they actively sought out including their favourite tv shows
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 feel like TV now just means Muzak with visuals in the home, tenth time watching an episode of the Simpsons I have my phone out and a movie I’ve never seen, it’s silent and charging.
Most mass-market TV shows and movies are such that you can tune out a good 25% of the time and still follow them just fine. Some of the worse ones aren't even as demanding as that.
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.
It's a cultural/socialization thing. Lots of people grow up with the TV always on in the background at home, going to sleep to the TV, and so on, so they keep doing that when they're on their own. Some who don't do it when they're alone will turn it on when someone's over, as it's just "what you do". I doubt they even think about it, they just do it.
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.
I am an only child, which likely has something to do with my preferences...
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.
I play music through my TV, often by finding a recorded musical performance on an app like YouTube. Does that count as “having TV on in the background?”
Point. I guess the more 1:1 analogy would be having the radio on in the background. muses
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.
Silence is easier to interrupt unintentionally than constant noise. For example, if my room is quiet, I can be easily distracted by a random noise caused by my cat across the house. If, however, I have the TV on (usually with YouTube build videos), I won’t hear the random but sudden noises that provide no value to me.
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.
I really enjoy complete pin drop silence, but when that isn't available (like when working at a computer that just can't be completely quiet) it's far more preferable to have some sort of conversation or music blocking out the sound instead of the whirring of fans and hard drives.
The article mentioned installing Wing Commander III in the DOS days- I feel like Wing Commander III was a better TV show than most TV shows out these days.
Is this only for regular (broadcast / commercial) TV, or does it include other things that you would watch in front of the TV (movies, or streaming episodic content)? Because for broadcast, I can see using a phone during commercial breaks.
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.
Jimmy Fallon is usually really annoying to me. It's something about the constant laughing and him being pretty bad at 'getting it' when it comes to the flow with guests, even though on a shallow level he's quite likeable.
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.
Add in how their humor generally doesn't amount to much more than bad faith descriptions of real world issues, senseless comparisons accompanied with a bad Photoshop and it's no wonder people use a second screen at the same time! John Oliver especially ran this sort of thing into the ground.
US TV is so disappointing when you expect an hour long episode but, because of the ads, it's only 42-43 minutes long. A mid-way intermission would be fine, but instead you get shallow plots driven by the need to shove in ads every 12 minutes. And all the procedurals are built around that, like the lives of those characters in that universe pause so some shitty marketing material can play. Of course, they're also 24 episodes long so they run for most of a year, and 90% of the show is the baddie of the week. The 10% of actual substance is distributed in 3-4 episodes throughout so you have to deal with all of it to get the real plot.
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.
> Of course, they're also 24 episodes long so they run for most of a year,
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.)
I've been rewatching the first season of Fringe lately and really enjoying the type of pacing you're talking about here. While the standalone episodes often have some piece tying into the overarching conspiracy, they're also valuable for offering time to build the relationships between the characters. Often in more contemporary shows, with hour-long episodes in 8-12 episode seasons, I feel like the interpersonal relationships rise and conflict abruptly and feel more contrived as a result; these longer seasons make the relationships feel more natural, as they're built on-screen rather than partially between episodes.
Fringe is an interesting case because the first season got one less commercial break per episode so there were five extra minutes compared to the other shows on network TV. That doesn’t sound like much but it’s amazing how different it feels from other shows in that first season. Also make sure you decode the glyphs: https://fringeglyphs.com :-)
> 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.
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.
Does watching Netflix, HBO, or Hulu count as watching TV? That's how I usually watch television shows and none has commercials.
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.
There's certainly a lot of boring, formulaic content out there. I recently watched Easy Rider and season 4 of Rick and Morty and in both cases my phone was left on a shelf and forgotten for hours. Yesterday I tried to watch the first episode of Witcher and it just wasn't my thing, I was fiddling with my phone after 10 minutes. (YMMV obviously)
Lossy = I don't need all the data. I can look away for most of a baseball game and still enjoy it. But if it's some intense drama like Game of Thrones then I need to see it all. You miss a scene and you're confused for episodes to come.
No, it depends on what content you're looking for. There are certain series where if I only care about the plot, I can find a synopsis on a wiki somewhere, or just listen to the show in the background. But if I want to get the full visual experience in the acting, cinematography, and production, I need to watch in order to be emotionally engaged.
Regardless of terminology, I'm trying to communicate the idea that some media demands your full attention while others don't.
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.
many of us, myself included, find silence distracting. I prefer to have something going on around me, whether the buzz of a coffee shop or a tv show I’ve seen lots of times droning on in the background.
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.
The pacing of TV shows is, in my opinion, not that great. There’s a lot of story or visual lulls where if I don’t have a second screen, I’ll just end up wandering away from the TV and won’t finish the show.
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.
> There’s a lot of story or visual lulls where if I don’t have a second screen, I’ll just end up wandering away from the TV and won’t finish the show.
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.
Marvel movies are all a prime example of the “all filler” garbage remake movies with sequel after sequel, advertising to you and fulfilling the lowest common denominator. Marvel movies are trash. All the phony superhero movies are made distractions for grown men to act like kids with superhero figures. They all are getting political, I can’t believe how duped they have “critical thinking” “hackers.”
What percentage of Americans use a screen while also listening to the radio? Doesn't seem much different to me. Especially for things like rolling news, political coverage, documentaries.
I watch new/good things like I'm watching a movie. Dark, silent, uninterrupted. I spend maybe 2-4 hours every week watching shows like this. Things like Game of Thrones or Rick and Morty come to mind.
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.
I don't watch much TV but occasionally I'll have the Reddit thread for the current/previous episode up for background information. But I definitely can't multitask if it's an engaging show.
Most recent case being Mr Robot it was primarily references and connections that went over my head from seasons back. But it's also fascinating to see people's reactions to the same reveals I'm watching. And of course, the predictions. Similar thoughts on Westworld.
Not prying at all! I suppose without the feed it's like watching a typical movie in a theater: I'm limited to what I notice/pick up/deduce on my own; and if I miss something I might go the rest of the movie without noticing more things. End result is I might miss fascinating angles I would've otherwise noticed, but still enjoyable.
That's kinda old-fashioned thinking. It's true that people who only watch one screen will find something else to do during a commercial, but people who habitually use two screens will use both regardless of what's on the TV.
Source: A company I used to work for did a metric buttload of research on this subject.
> It's true that people who only watch one screen will find something else to do during a commercial, but people who habitually use two screens will use both regardless of what's on the TV.
Then they are only using the handheld (or laptop) screen, and they are not watching the TV
Anecdotal, but I usually have something on TV in the background (a random youtube video/music set) and use a laptop to browser reddit/HN all the time. (Obviously this is when I'm chilling by myself and not when I have friends/people over)
Same here. It's basically the same thing as people 100 years ago reading a newspaper while a radio was on. It's nice to just have a bit of background noise.
I'm the total opposite: I have no music or TV in the background as I like my environment to be as silent as possible so I can hear my own thoughts. But when people are over, I play music and turn the TV on so they don't figure out right away I'm a boring weirdo (to them; I don't bore myself).
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.
> 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'm often on IMDB trying to figure out where I've seen some bit part character before.
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.
Or to put it more generally, the second screen is there for when content on the main screen is rubbish. The implication that if you watch a movie you should watch 100% of it without looking away is preposterous, as let's face it a "good" movie today is 40% rubbish cinematic trope filler.
Maybe? Between the DVR and TV from non-ad sources, we rarely see any commercials at all -- and yet my wife and I both routinely have another screen up during SOME shows.
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 use my phone to find out more about a place, person or topic mentioned in a tv show. Maybe a coffee shop where Larry David’s is in Curb - or it could be something a bit more cerebral.
For the same reason 50% of Americans will be obese within 10 years and why similar numbers also use a second screen while someone is trying to talk to them.
I think our brains have gotten so dopamine-wired that our attention span has suffered. I am reading Digital Minimalism which touches on this a bit, but I'd be interested to know if there are any rigorous studies relating to this topic.
I can feel my brain being caught in a fog as my attention span has dropped drastically due to the over-stimulation. I'm going to start leaving my phone at home a few days a week and meditate in the mornings to improve on myself.
I definitely agree with the comments here. For me, TVs have the screen size I want but not the software/hardware or content I prefer. Smartphones have great access to software and content but at a screen-size that is limited. Casting works but needs dedicated hardware or else it feels slow and clunky.
Noone seems to have mentioned the potential for a second screen to augment what's being watched on TV. I'm frequently reaching for phone or tablet to look up details about actors, or references I don't get, or just other related info.
This is what amazon x-ray does, but it would be nice if you could connect a phone app with the streaming app so you could look up xray data on the second screen.
I love the Amazon X-Ray feature. I wonder if they patented it, because I’m surprised other players like Netflix or cable providers are not offering something similar. I personally find it adds a lot to my viewing experience without being too intrusive.
Amazon owns IMDb. They have been gathering data about actors for literally decades. They probably have well-trained machine learning models to identify actors on screen.
It's really not that hard since they can run it against a narrowed down dataset with the names of the cast.
People watching a twitch.tv stream on their tv would have the livechat on their phone/tablet. Seeing the people in the chat react can make even the dullest stream fun.
I’m often times checking the live match thread of the game I’m currently watching on /r/soccer (or on /r/baseball if I’m watching a baseball game). It definitely adds up to the basic “watch TV” experience, for better or worst. I’m also actively checking for live scores of other matches playing at the same time.
Honestly, while I'm one of the people who does this a lot, I don't think it always benefits me. I don't watch 'TV', just streamed stuff but I rarely bother to pause it when I look up these details. And that absolutely impacts my viewing experience because if a movie is plot-heavy enough, I can miss chunks of it easily why I try to figure out why that actress in a minor part seems familiar or what the song playing in the background is. Would love to kick the habit but it's surprisingly tough!
I strongly agree! I'd actually quite like a sort of end-notes equivalent for TV shows, but it would have to be tailored to me. Maybe an app that I can tell what I'm watching, that will let me just click a button to store a 'point of interest'. Then, when the show is over (or maybe during the next ad break), I can review the list; each point would tell me actors in the scene, last 10 seconds of dialogue, maybe geographical location - those sort of details.
Noone seems to have mentioned the potential for a second screen to augment what's being watched on TV. I'm frequently reaching for phone or tablet to look up details about actors, or references I don't get, or just other related info.
A number of apps developed to do just this have come and gone, but none seem to have succeeded.
What else am I supposed to do when 30% of the content is ads? The second screen is for me to look at while the ads are muted and I'm waiting for them to go away.
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.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 258 ms ] threadThis 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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
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?
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).
Just wait until AI puts likenesses of ourselves and our social circles into the stories.
New England Journal of Medicine: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMsa1909301?query=fe...
My primary focus is on several other computer screens.
Inverted: excessively slow software builds. :)
A number of apps developed to do just this have come and gone, but none seem to have succeeded.
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.