Abstract
This article argues that television’s resilience in the current media landscape can best be understood by analyzing its role in a broader quest to organize attention across different media. For quite a while, the mobile phone was considered to be a disturbance both for watching television and for classroom teaching. In recent years, however, strategies have been developed to turn the second screen’s distractive potential into a source for intensified, personalized and social attention. This has consequences for television’s position in a multimedia assemblage: television’s alleged specificities (e.g. liveness) become mouldable features, which are selectively applied to guide the attention of users across different devices and platforms. Television does not end, but some of its traditional features do only persist because of its strategic complementarity with other media; others are re-adapted by new technologies thereby spreading televisual modes of attention across multiple screens. The article delineates the historical development of simultaneous media use as a ‘problematization’—from alternating (and competitive) media use to multitasking and finally complementary use of different media. Additionally, it shows how similar strategies of managing attention are applied in the ‘digital classroom’. While deliberately avoiding to pin down, what television is, the analysis of the problem of attention allows for tracing how old and new media features are constantly reshuffled. This article combines three arguments: (1) the second screen is conceived of as both a danger to attention and a tool to manage attention. (2) To organize attention, the second screen assemblage modulates the specific qualities of television and all the other devices involved. (3) While being a fragile and often inconsistent assemblage, the second screen spreads its dynamics—and especially the problem of attention—far beyond television, e.g. into the realm of teaching.
Highlights
Television, like all media today, has become one of many possible objects of attention in a layered assemblage of platforms and devices
Media and Communication, 2016, Volume 4, Issue 3, Pages 185-198 scribe the details of actual existing applications or forms of use but to analyze the ‘problematizations’ (Castel, 1994; Deacon, 2000) of attention: what are the conceptual and actual re-definitions of attention emerging across popular, industrial and academic debates? What strategies and instruments are imagined and realized to deal with attention? What happens to television’s traditional modes of attention and how do other devices and practices appropriate them? While deliberately avoiding the attempt to pin down what television is and what it will become, such an approach allows for tracing how old and new features are constantly reshuffled. Thereby it touches on more general media theoretical questions: is it still possible—and does it still make sense—to distinguish individual media? Can we identify affordances specific to one medium? Some traditional temporal characteristics of television—e.g. flow or liveness—are partly re-animated and transformed in a cross-media landscape, but they get partly dissociated from television
The habit of multitasking—the simultaneous but unconnected use of different media—has to be continuously transformed into the complementary use of distinct media infrastructures and devices. This is very much where television at the moment overlaps with broader problematizations of media culture: the specificities of media have to be arranged into an assemblage that allows for interconnection and interdependency, translating the always menacing threat of distraction into intensified attention
Summary
Television, like all media today, has become one of many possible objects of attention in a layered assemblage of platforms and devices. In the following I will focus on the emergence of the second screen to analyze how television got integrated in a cross-media assemblage that appropriates the medium’s features as strategies among others to create and modulate attention. Second screens are used in classrooms too to transform distraction into attention and the respective debates and strategies are insightful for understanding television’s changing role in the cross-media assemblage. Already before the rise of mass media like film and television, media technologies have aimed to modify, increase, and manage attention (Crary, 2001, 2014) On in this development, attention became reconceived as a complex and temporal process: distraction was considered to be a constitutive part of an unavoidably distributed form of attention (Löffler, 2013, 2014). This implies that quite different modes of attention become combined, which dissolves the idea that each medium is characterized by one specific mode of attention
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