Tracing Attentions

SMU and the Humanities

Interest in SMU stems from broader cultural concerns about how people incorporate media into their everyday routines. The disjunction between how media “should” be used and how subjects actually juggle them within a myriad of other activities has inspired a tremendous volume of writing both inside and outside the humanities. Most of this recent literature has taken an alarmist tone, arguing that simultaneous or hypermedia use either stretches attentive capacities past a breaking point or divides attentions in ways incompatible with political, pedagogical, or productive goals. Since the late nineties, cognitive psychologists have warned of multitasking’s “inefficient” partition of attention among duties (Hallowell 2006; Marois and Ivanoff 2005), whereas cultural critics like Nicholas Carr (2010) and Maggie Jackson (2009) have interpreted the prevalence of multitasking as a sign of Western society’s decay into distraction and superficiality.

Within film and media studies specifically, the work on SMU and media multitasking is noticeably smaller, but tend to fall into one of two categories. Cinema scholars such as Anne Friedberg (2006), Nicholas Rombes (2009), and Aylish Wood (2008) have analyzed multiscreen film exhibition from more aesthetic standpoints, focusing on how multiwindowed art installations and split-screen effects encourage viewers to select between competing screen quadrants at once. Another emerging body of work, more grounded in media and cultural studies, has conceptualized media multitasking as a site of tension in neoliberal discourses about work, leisure, and self-productivity (Gregg 2011; Hassoun 2012; Shaffer 2008; Spigel 2010). Despite their respective strengths, both camps leave out important features of SMU as a wider receptive practice. The film studies work focuses too heavily on special installations or textual analysis of specific films, rather than on simultaneous screens as a quotidian or viewer-guided phenomenon. The cultural studies work concentrates almost exclusively on new media’s facilitation of flexible labor, particularly for white-collar subjects working in creative, clerical, and communications sectors. Less research has been done on simultaneous media’s imbrications with a variety of everyday activities (both work and nonwork), or on how SMU functions as a particular form of audience behavior.

The precedents for this type of research would lie in the earliest work on “active audiences” conducted within cultural studies in the 1980s and early-1990s. Cultural scholars recognized early on that media use (specifically television watching) was a variable activity caught within the tapestry of everyday life. Although few researchers discussed attention spans specifically, some notion of media attention and inattention usually underscored work arguing that audiences were active subjects rather than passive dupes with their eyes glued to the screen. This is most apparent in studies of television’s role within women’s domestic labor cycles, which analyzed how housewives balanced radio listening and television watching with other household chores occupying their time (Hobson 1982; Modleski 1983; Spigel 1992). In his canonic study of TV viewing, David Morley (1986, 151) noted similarly fluctuating levels of interest and disinterest in given programs (particularly between men and women). Patricia Palmer’s (1986, 65) work on child television audiences also observed how subjects combined TV watching with numerous other activities both related and unrelated to televised content.

However, this work on television’s “principle of interruptibility” (Modleski 1983) was conducted during an era when scholars could reasonably assume that the ancillary activities conducted around the television set did not include other electronic media. However, the recent proliferation of personalized electronic devices and home-accessible Internet may have made these normative assumptions of sequential, single-screen engagement no longer acceptable. In spite of this, writers on convergence have been curiously reticent about contextualizing the receptive fields in which new, “interactive” media are being used. Though new media scholars have charted the increasing ability of content to flow across and through disparate media channels (Dawson 2007; Johnson 2007; Spigel and Olsson 2004; Wessels 2011), they still tend to presume that users engage with this content one medium at a time. Henry Jenkins, for one, notes that convergent media allow users to multitask homework, web scanning, instant messaging, and more activities (2006, 16), but his subsequent discussions of “participatory cultures” still treat fans as engaging episodes before and after their completion rather than through multiple devices as they are actually airing. A presumptive connection between interactive media forms and more attentive engagement seems to be the norm.

This assumption is also evident in Daniel McDonald and Jingbo Meng’s (2009) article on the “multitasking of entertainment,” one of the only sustained discussions of SMU in the humanities as of this writing. The two authors provide a useful history of early trade discourse on SMU in the twentieth century but noticeably struggle to situate it within contemporary media practice. They distinguish between traditional “streaming” media such as radio or MP3 players, which broadcast predetermined sets of content to users, and “new” media like instant messaging, which require more interactive user engagement. They contend that the relatively “incomplex” nature of streaming media leaves them more amenable to simultaneous use with other devices and channels (ibid, 149). Following Jenkins, the authors argue that contemporary television offers consumers a “newer, more interactive experience,” but ultimately conclude that TV now “tends to discourage multitasking” due to its requirement for concentrated viewer attention (McDonald and Meng 2009, 155). Like many authors, McDonald and Meng are never clear about how they define “interactive” (Is it a medium-fixed or contextually determined quality?), and they erroneously equate interactivity with more sustained levels of attention (as if new media somehow transcend the attentive fields that older media were within).

To the contrary, the rise of “interactive” media has only multiplied the potentials for distraction and split attention in various environments. SMU follows a rich record of work in media and cultural studies about “active audiences” and the practices of everyday life, but expands beyond previous work in its focus on where and how viewers split their attentions across various screens over time. To analyze SMU more concretely, critical scholarship requires an update on the different receptive contexts in which media are now used. Ironically, the best way to begin such a contextualization is to look outside of the humanities to how SMU has been framed by media producers and advertisers. As McDonald and Meng correctly note, most recent research efforts on SMU have “been driven by the advertising industry and are rarely published in academic journals” (2009, 150). Contrary to the lack of critical research, media industries have very eagerly examined SMU over the past decade in the hopes of capturing viewer attentions more effectively.

In the following sections, I position SMU within a longer history of administrative research about media distraction—research that in some ways parallels older audience work done by cultural studies, but which has changed to account for simultaneous viewing conditions. Specifically, I summarize how SMU presents industries with new areas for capitalization while also heightening uncertainties about the effectiveness of their messages in the distraction-filled space of the home. Analyzing how these opportunities and anxieties exist together reveals the developments in, as well as limitations of, the industry’s conception of audiences in the new media landscape, and provides a foundation from which critical approaches may develop.

Inattention and Television: A Brief Overview

Industries and social scientists have long known that viewer attention levels ebb and flow wildly over the course of any broadcast. Unable to directly control who will see their messages and in what contexts (especially in the “private” space of the home), companies can only speculate about how attentive their viewers will be when messages air. As Philip Napoli has summarized, “In selling audiences, media firms essentially deal in human attention, and human attention represents a much more abstract, elusive, and intangible product than, say, steel, insurance, or legal services” (2003, 5). As early as 1935, Hadley Cantril and Gordon Allport noted in their study on radio that it was “impossible to determine accurately the division of this [radio listening] time between attentive listening and preoccupation with other matters” (1935, 88, emphasis in original).

Administrative research on television activities stretches back to the 1960s, nearly two decades before comparable work began under cultural studies. Investigators initially studied home viewing to measure discrepancies between self-report diaries (as used by Nielsen) and “actual” viewing levels of TV watchers (Robinson 1969; Schramm et al. 1961; Steiner 1966). A widely cited study conducted by Charles Allen (1965, 6) found that substantial percentages of audiences would “eat, drink, sleep, play, argue, fight, and occasionally make love” in front of the TV set rather than giving undivided attention to the programming or ads onscreen. In each case, researchers concluded that television viewing was often a secondary activity to a multitude of other behaviors occurring around the television viewing space, and that even viewers deliberately watching programming varied their attentions based on circumstantial factors.

Social scientists in the 1970s and 1980s continued along similar trajectories, with various attempts to fit analyses of “ordinary viewing behaviors” within media effects and (then-developing) uses and gratifications models. One of the most significant series of studies was commissioned by the U.S. Surgeon General in the 1970s to study the effects of media violence and patterns of TV use. Research teams contextualized viewing environments by measuring, among others, viewers’ degrees of attention to particular programs, children’s concentration during advertisements, and secondary activities that viewers engaged in while the TV was on (Rubinstein et al. 1972). Uses and gratifications research conducted a decade later by James Lull (1980, 1981, 1988) similarly treated television as a social setting in which viewers sometimes interacted with one another and the screen in ways irrelevant to the content being aired. This interest in distractive and inattentive practices was echoed through numerous other publications around the same period (Anderson et al. 1986; Hopkins and Mullis 1985; Levin and Anderson 1976; Reeves and Thorson 1986; Thorson et al. 1985). All took part in a growing conversation shifting focus away from the “effects of television” to more contextual questions of under what conditions an effect is most likely (McLeod et al. 1982, 272).

Reviewing this early literature today, two important trends emerge. First, researchers used their direct observations to reconceptualize the home as a potential field of distractions. Data revealing the myriad of other behaviors occurring before the television suggested that TV viewing was a “discontinuous, often interrupted, and frequently nonexclusive activity” (Comstock et al. 1978, 146–47). Second, most researchers indicate a deep mistrust in the accuracy of traditional audience measurement methods. Self-report diaries were widely seen as over-reporting viewing time, whereas people meters installed into TV sets recorded times that the set was on, but not how much of that period viewers actually watched. As a remedy, most researchers proposed alternate means of data collection to precisely measure their subjects’ “eyes-on-screen” time. These “solutions” range from researchers covertly observing their own families in front of the TV (Steiner 1966), to in-person ethnographic studies (Krugman et al. 1995; Lull 1980), to filmed observations of people watching television (Allen 1965; Anderson et al. 1986; Bechtel et al. 1972; Collett and Lamb 1986). In all cases, scientists advocated for more direct, instantaneous forms of measuring viewer-screen interactions.

This early research would expand significantly with the growth of personal and handheld media devices in the twenty-first century. The next section analyzes these developments, specifically how SMU reconceptualizes the “inattentive” activities of early research into present discourses on “interactivity.” Examining these trends charts not only how SMU has impacted strategies of audience measurement and surveillance, but also how the industry presently frames the meanings around interactive media writ large.

Synergizing Attentions: Simultaneity Research Today

Administrative discourses on TV viewing behavior have shifted since the early 2000s to consider SMU as one of the litany of activities done before the TV set. Statistical estimates vary from study to study, but some researchers have suggested that, among adults, anywhere from 40 to 65 percent of media time is spent with more than one medium at once (Pilotta and Schultz 2005, 21). Children and young adults are even more robust, switching their attentions among media an average of twenty-seven times per TV broadcast hour (Steinberg 2012).

What especially entices advertisers, though, is not the rate of oscillation between devices, but the cumulative amount of viewing time this switching generates. Unlike previous forms of “inattention,” ancillary screens are seen as increasing cumulative exposure to media messages rather than detracting from them. Research firm Experian Simmons estimated that simultaneous users fit nearly thirty-eight hours of media and nonmedia-related activity into a single 24-hour day (Shreffler 2011, 3), with multitasking sixteen- to twenty-two-year-olds spending sixty-one hours per week on entertainment alone (Donahue 2000, A1). In addition, Nielsen found that simultaneous users watched 14 percent more television and spent 61 percent more time online than other consumers (O’Hara 2009). Where the entertainment industry once worried that subjects were distracting themselves from media with unrelated activities, the conversation is now shifting to the potentials for integrating multiple media into simultaneous experiences.

For audience measurement firms, this means that deficiencies in audience research noted by researchers in the 1970s and 1980s about self-reports and metering technologies have now entered mainstream industry consciousness. Although industries have long suspected that viewer inattention was common, the historical solution was seen as statistical. If advertisers could measure a large enough demographic tuned in to a station at a given time, the consequences of select viewer inattention were deemed negligible. However, in the post-network era, where the mass audience has broken into clusters of ever more specialized markets, attention itself has become a far more valuable commodity (Davenport and Beck 2001). In the new attention economy, with a cacophony of media options now crying for individual concentration at any one time, quality of attention becomes all the more desirable than quantity (Dovey 2011, 142). Interest in SMU arises at a time when advertisers have developed a much keener interest in where precisely viewer eyeballs are focusing at each moment.

Unsurprisingly, proponents of research into SMU often use the occasion to advocate changes in traditional methods for measuring audience engagement, challenging their colleagues in the industry to “rethink conventional wisdom” about how to best gather data about individual consumption habits (Pilotta et al. 2004; Whiting 2009). Napoli summarizes this as the effort to create a “post-exposure audience marketplace” where existing attempts to maximize viewer media exposure give way to a “multidimensional conceptualization of the audience . . . to be analyzed across multiple media consumption platforms” (2012, 88–89).

Enacting these reforms has required ever more nuanced apparatuses for surveilling individual habits and cognitive engagements. Echoing the recommendations of the past, many researchers reject viewer self-reports and laboratory experiment settings, claiming that they lack verisimilitude to everyday environments where consumers toggle between media (Koolstra et al. 2009, 241; Papper et al. 2004, 6). Rather than relying on consumers themselves for information or conducting tests within controlled settings, SMU research has spearheaded more calculated strategies for surveilling what subjects do with media behind closed doors. In this way, SMU intersects with larger trends in data mining and predictive behavioral targeting within media-tracking companies. On the more qualitative side, industry researchers argue that understanding SMU requires more consideration of affective engagement. They claim that only by understanding the pleasures that audiences derive from specific media can researchers theorize why certain media are combined, how they bleed into one another, and what constitutes a viewers’ primary and secondary screens. Hence, the latest “cutting edge” research attempts to scope out the emotional-behavioral impulses motivating consumers’ media choices from screen to screen (Pilotta and Schultz 2005, 26).

Numerous research projects have already attempted to measure user response and media flow at the micro-level. One study conducted by Time Warner and Innerscope Research required participants to wear biometric belts monitoring their physical responses, and camera-embedded glasses recording what media they used and for how long. Analysts would then sync the subjects’ media choices to measurements of their physical responses, revealing “truths” about their relative investment in each particular medium over time (Steinberg 2012). Of all the major audience aggregators, Nielsen has been most prominent in revamping its data collection methods to better account for SMU. Historically reliant on self-reports, Nielsen instituted its “Anytime Anywhere Media Measurement (A2/M2)” initiative in 2006 to move beyond isolated television measurements and instead monitor video consumption across “three screens”: TVs, computers, and mobile phones. Under the new initiative, select Nielsen households installed meter software onto all of their devices, allowing coordinated measurements of what individuals were watching on all three screens at once (O’Hara 2009). Apparently not content with just three screens, Nielsen widened the A2/M2 initiative in 2010 to incorporate measurements of “fourth screens” in public venues like movie theaters, bars, gas stations, and hotels (Lowry 2010, 13). Expanding far beyond traditional methods of directing particular consumers to particular messages, today’s producers are increasingly invested in the minutiae of what screens people see, when they see them, and how they link up to other, nearby media.

Of course, whether these simultaneous experiences sync different devices in meaningful and, above all, predictable ways is another matter entirely. There have been multiple propositions about how best to instrumentalize the findings on SMU into programming amenable to advertisers. Given the extent to which producers now see a multiscreen, multi-interface viewing environment as a desired norm, some in the industry speculate on the possibilities of synergizing content simultaneously across media. Joseph Pilotta of marketing intelligence firm BIGResearch proposed the following:

Media experience needs to be studied, created, and planned as an integration of simultaneous streams that do not compete for attention but media experiences [that] are synergized by attention. One is not exposed but attends to media with a shifting span of attention and focus. This means that foreground and background experience be considered together. (Pilotta and Schultz 2005, 25)

There has been much buzz over the extent to which SMU changes viewers’ attentive capacities and how best producers can hail audiences who are probably oscillating between several media at once. Rather than viewing SMU as a competition among screens, producers and researchers are speculating how to integrate overlapping media into “synergized simultaneous” streams of content where devices reinforce or harmonize with one another (Schultz et al. 2012). Numerous studies support this proposition, suggesting that target consumers, especially children and teenagers, may utilize media simultaneously to engage in related content or to reinforce their engagement to a primary screen (Bardhi et al. 2010, 326–28; Rohm et al. 2008; Shreffler 2011, 4).

Experiments with synchronized media are nothing new. As early as 1996, researchers toyed with mobile phones and personalized electronics designed to interact with television programming (Tsekleves et al. 2011, 153). However, the rise of interactive devices and portable, Internet-capable electronics since the nineties has ballooned the possibilities of real-time feedback loops between media. Social networking sites are among the most prominent examples, as members commonly use Facebook or Twitter to broadcast their real-time reactions to screenings and TV episodes as they are viewing them. This is especially the case with live sports and awards programming: during the last three minutes of the 2012 Super Bowl alone, an average of 10,000 people per second tweeted their thoughts on the game (Tsukayama 2012).

Taking note of consumers’ readiness to synchronize devices around a single program, producers have experimented with stretching their properties across simultaneous screens in the hopes of creating more immersive experiences for their brands. The embrace of simultaneous viewing is most robust around Apple’s iPad, which permits downloads of numerous applications meant to supplement select TV programming. For instance, the 2011 Academy Awards’ “Oscar Backstage Pass” app offered users live streams of backstage locations at the Kodak Theatre during commercial breaks (though these alternative cameras were switched off whenever the main show was airing). More successful was the Academy’s Facebook site and Twitter feed, which encouraged watchers to “like” and comment on the announcement of winners as the pages updated in conjunction with the live broadcast (Graser 2011a). Social networking synergies are also on display with various apps such as Miso, TV Check-In, Philo, Loyalize, and Watchpoints, which encourage viewers to “check in” to social networking sites and share their real-time opinions about what they are watching in exchange for rewards and points (Griffith 2011).

The iPad has also facilitated the birth of so-called “companion apps”: programs designed to display instant polls, “exclusive” videos and photographs, and other paratextual materials synced to whatever is occurring on the “primary” television screen. Numerous experiments such as MTV’s WatchWith, VH1’s Co-Star, General Electric’s NBCLive, and even an app for the Weather Channel’s From the Edge with Peter Lik have all offered additional second screen supplements to stations’ primetime lineups (Wallenstein 2011). Several corporations have even expanded their companion features into older media like film, traditionally seen as an exclusively uniscreen narrative form. In 2011, for instance, Disney and the Weinstein Company created second screen tablet accessories for Blu-ray releases of Bambi, Tron: Legacy, and The King’s Speech (Morris 2011a, 2011b). Fox’s companion app for its television show Sons of Anarchy is particularly notable for its more explicit attempts to capitalize on viewer attentions. Synced to the program, the app encouraged users to read about and purchase any of the product tie-ins featured throughout the episode (Graser 2011b). Regardless of how well second screens catch on, these efforts represent a burgeoning sentiment (even if only temporary) within the industry that SMU is “the next evolution” (Patel 2010). As one Fox executive offered on Sons of Anarchy,

We thought there’s a great opportunity with technology to do something where you can engage in a completely different manner than ever before . . . There’s not a show that has a higher level of engagement than this one. (Graser 2011b)

Interactivity and the Limits of Simultaneity

The equation between SMU and consumer engagement is constantly echoed within trade presses and science journals. Tsekleves et al. contend that the ability to interact with multiple screens “empowers” consumers by allowing “for the dynamic reconfiguration of the user interface to reflect a user’s personal needs and desires” (2011, 154). Another researcher (Russell 2010, 125–26) sees the focus on SMU as an industry shift from metrics of “assumed attention to earned engagement” (though one wonders whether the television has “earned” our attention every time we glance up from our laptop to the nearby set). Echoing Jenkins (2006), SMU discourses suggest, at least at first glance, that developments in transmedia have led to a more robustly interactive landscape permitting users to draw from their own preferences in shaping media content. However, like much of the hype surrounding Web 2.0 and participatory media, prophecies about SMU do not necessarily correspond to material realities of the practice.

In fact, the more research we see on SMU, the more we may conclude that, although “synergistic simultaneity” has rapidly become normalized, it may not represent the norm for most audiences. Notwithstanding a smaller minority that “strategically” switch between media using companion apps or social networks, viewers may use media simultaneously for strikingly banal reasons: to kill time, to alleviate boredom with a particular screen, to check email or get work done while watching their show, to communicate with friends or family (Bardhi et al. 2010, 324).

In this way, despite intense investment and speculation around the practice, much of SMU remains analogous to the kinds of “irrelevant” behaviors that researchers have observed viewers performing around TV sets since the 1960s. These activities can serve diversionary functions, similar to how earlier scholars noted TV’s role in avoiding domestic labor or family interactions (Lindlof and Traudt 1983), or they may be the product of sheer whim or impulse. In either case, the particular media a consumer combines may be more the result of specific social circumstances than an insatiable desire to synthesize media outlets or receive “behind-the-scenes” trivia. There is an undeniably ludic, unpredictable component to many people’s SMU, which is not to imply that they are passive, but to note that they are not necessarily interactive in the ways media companies and industry cheerleaders like to imagine them.

This seemingly arbitrary side of SMU may explain why, hidden within celebrations of the practice as a leap forward for media synergy, there is a palpable anxiety over what the rise of SMU means for the future of marketing. Many ad researchers are aware of cognitive psychology’s condemnation of multitasking as an inefficient use of mental powers, and several studies have even suggested that SMU distracts consumers from receiving intended messages or forming intense brand relationships (Chowdhury et al. 2007; Voorveld 2011; Yoon et al. 2011). One Nielsen study even found that up to 80 percent of simultaneous users were not using their extra screens to access anything remotely related to the program on the TV (Wallenstein 2011). Another skeptical team of researchers concluded that SMU “challenges the very idea of media users making a more or less deliberate decision about what kind of media they are going to use and what specific content they are willing to expose themselves to” (Koolstra et al. 2009, 234). Given this continued analogy of SMU with distraction, it is hardly surprising that one alarmist op-ed piece for Advertising Age would assert that multitasking was outright “killing” major advertising campaigns (Skenazy 2008).

Beyond SMU’s associations with distraction, it is also uncertain how robustly viewers will embrace opportunities to synchronize programming over multiple screens. After failing to attract much interest in a companion app for its show Grey’s Anatomy, ABC acknowledged that, although the technology was in a “frothy experimental stage,” there might be a limited audience for second screen materials accompanying scripted programs (Wallenstein 2012). Such concessions point to the underside of interactivity discourses. As S. Elizabeth Bird has argued, despite intensified industry scrutiny around them, only a small fraction of media audiences are participatory in the ways companies want them to be (2011, 504), a reality that even Henry Jenkins acknowledges in Convergence Culture (2006, 23). Although this should not be taken to imply that all SMU is unstructured or unpredictable, it does speak to the fact that much of the picture of why audiences do what they do in front of the TV remains somewhat of a mystery.

As Ien Ang (1991) reminds us, audiences will never precisely align with the discourses advertisers, producers, and researchers construct around them. SMU cannot be exhausted by any “totalizing, taxonomic definition” (41) seeking to pin down how and why media are combined, even though the industry financially depends on such speculations. Here, we observe the limits of administrative research on SMU: Driven by the need to instrumentalize audiences, industries will only account for a limited conception of what interactivity means. However, this gap in administrative discourses presents an opening for critical scholarship to conduct more grounded research on SMU’s cultural significance. This article will conclude with a few proposals for forms such research could take.

Conclusion

As this overview of industry studies suggests, SMU is ensnared within a long history of administrative research about distraction, inattention, and social activities around television watching, some of it echoing similar insights from cultural studies about active audience behaviors in the home. However, the industry has gone beyond this initial work to more dynamically speculate about how viewer attentions flow through multiple screens. This development represents both an opportunity and a challenge to critical scholars interested in new media reception—namely, how to similarly incorporate considerations of SMU into new research without replicating the presumptions about interactivity that the industry relies on.

One alternative may be to begin more concrete studies into the contexts in which new media interactivity and “participation” actually take place. For all the buzz around convergence, there has been remarkably little research into the micropractices of audiences (especially nonfans) engaging with new devices in everyday environments. New media are often framed as disembedded from lived space, rather than situated within the rhythms of everyday life (for exceptions, see Bakardjieva 2005; Mackay and Ivey 2004; Tutt 2008). However, returning to the kind of observational audience work exemplified by some cultural studies work in the 1980s may allow more contextualized insights into activities otherwise ignored by Web 2.0 prophets and industry researchers. Such studies may reveal that audiences are active (as so much work in media studies has argued), but not necessarily attentive. SMU and its related histories of distraction teach us to never take for granted the most basic unit of any viewer’s spectatorship: her or his attention span. The receptive circumstances of any medium, “interactive” or not, are often determined not by an intrinsic aspect of the medium itself, but by the varying ways that receivers use it, ignore it, or split their attentions between it and other matters.

From this more material starting point, we may examine SMU’s relation to a host of cultural attitudes and practices that may or may not have anything to do with “strategically syncing” devices together. For example, there is a wealth of scholarship yet to be written about how new media facilitate the multitasking of entertainment along with work activities (insofar as simultaneous users of certain backgrounds may work on their laptops or smartphones while also “chilling out” before the TV). Ethnographic studies could further examine how audiences view their own SMU, and the degrees to which they act out of a sense of engagement, obligation, or even disinterest to the multiple screens before them. Analysis of SMU as a ritual may also open new opportunities for researching fluctuating audience engagement (for instance, are viewers more likely to shut their laptops or silence their phones while watching media they enjoy more?). More broadly, SMU can broaden our understandings of how primary and secondary screens structure mediated space. As Jonathan Gray and Amanda Lotz (2012, 128–29) argue, the context of watching a show live while one’s friends are tweeting their thoughts is very different from watching it in other times and circumstances. Where audience researchers have noted a split in scholarship analyzing receptive spaces outside the screen versus reader responses to the texts within the screen (Press and Livingstone 2006), SMU suggests ways in which the two can be productively examined together. SMU stretches textual materials across different points in space, such that texts and viewing contexts are deeply codependent.

Beyond just describing media use more “accurately,” SMU suggests fresh ways to reflect on the power relations between producers and receivers in a hypermedia environment. SMU can help us understand the messy and busy environments in which viewers engage with (or are utterly bored by) a program or medium, often contrary to the predictions of media companies. While this need not imply that SMU is a necessarily resistant practice, it does raise underdiscussed issues about how distraction and multitasking impact the participatory landscape we are supposedly living in. Giving the ongoing attempts of disciplinary structures to establish regimes of “proper” media use—witness the growing concerns over Internet addiction or texting in movie theaters—these questions seem especially salient.

There are numerous ways to analyze SMU without romanticizing it as the “way of the future” or damning it as psychologically damaging or discursively unknowable. What is most important, however, is for scholars to stop assuming that audiences are engaging with media texts in isolation and to truly reckon with the multiscreen conditions under which many consumers now use media and receive their messages. Television viewing is no longer the single-screen sequencing of images and sounds that Raymond Williams (1974) famously described as “flow,” but a more frenzied web of content that is coordinated (or not) among many potential devices at once. This is the definition of television that advertisers are currently trying to embrace, and it is crucial that critical scholars learn ways of contextualizing this change. If this preliminary overview of SMU literature teaches us anything, it is the importance of keeping abreast of and engaged with administrative research being conducted within the communications industry and social sciences. Advertisers and media moguls may have, to an extent, started our discussion about SMU, but they do not have to have the final word.