The Procrastination Economy

The Big Business of Downtime

Ethan Tussey

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781479844234
• eBook ISBN: 9781479895748
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

2018 Outstanding Academic Title, given by Choice Magazine

How mobile devices make our in-between moments valuable to media companies while also providing a sense of control and connection

In moments of downtime – waiting for a friend to arrive or commuting to work – we pull out our phones for a few minutes of distraction. Just as television reoriented the way we think about living rooms, mobile devices have taken over the interstitial spaces of our everyday lives. Ethan Tussey argues that these in-between moments have created a procrastination economy, an opportunity for entertainment companies to create products, apps, platforms, subscription services, micropayments, and interactive opportunities that can colonize our everyday lives.

But as businesses commoditize our free time, and mobile devices become essential tools for promotion, branding and distribution, consumers are using these devices as a means of navigating public and private space. These devices are not just changing the way we spend and value our time, but also how we interact with others and transform our sense of the politics of space.

By examining the four main locations of the procrastination economy—the workplace, the commute, the waiting room, and the "connected" living room—Ethan Tussey illuminates the relationship between the entertainment industry and the digitally empowered public.

1

The Procrastination Economy and the Mobile Day Part

Comedian Louis C.K. often aims his acerbic wit at mobile phones and their users. Expressing concern about the technology, he claims it provides constant distractions that keep people from facing the realities of life: “That’s why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they’re killing, everybody’s murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.”1 C.K.’s humor reflects concerns about media technologies that have occupied scholars for decades. Media and communications technologies change our relationship with the outside world by blurring the division between public and private life. Evaluating the technological affordance of television, Raymond Williams used the concept of “mobile privatization” to describe the ways television enabled people to enter public life from the comfort of their home.2 In an analysis of portable television, Lynn Spigel flipped Williams’s term to “privatized mobility” to describe how mobile devices enable people to bring the comforts of home to public spaces.3 People enjoy privatized mobility every time they use their mobile devices to access their personal media collections or have a private conversation in public spaces. Critics of mobile devices see these activities as a cocoon that separates people from the outside world.4

The fact that mobile devices often act as a barrier to public interaction leads people to see mobile technology as detrimental to empathy and community. The cultural theorist Jonathan Sterne equates mobile devices with increased individualism, as people can use these devices to customize their experience of public spaces.5 Michael Bull claims that mobile devices create an “audio bubble” that physically separates people from their fellow citizens.6 A substantial amount of research on mobile devices has focused on the question of the effects of mobile devices on social interactions.7 Zizi Papacharissi’s work sees mobile devices as offering a retreat to a private sphere where people can feel comfortable engaging with public life.8 For Papacharissi, mobile device use in public space is a political act in which people assert their autonomy by “sustain[ing] existing relationships and creat[ing] new ones.”9 Scott Campbell’s research confirms some of Papacharissi’s arguments, as he finds that mobile devices offer “network privatism” by supporting strong relationships and hindering weak relationships.10 Essentially, these devices make it easier to stay connected with our loved ones while also helping us disconnect from our immediate surroundings.

Mobile devices amplify and enhance preexisting behaviors and tactics for navigating public space. If we focus on the procrastination economy, mobile devices are positioned in the appropriate spatial and historical context. Media technologies have long been used to fill our downtime, and modern mobile devices are a part of this history. Only by understanding this history does the procrastination economy emerge as the dominant logic that supports mobile use and the monetization efforts that attempt to profit on those habits. Scholars tend to overlook the contextual factors in favor of an examination of the technological affordances of mobile devices. For example, Campbell contends that mobile devices, smartphones in particular, have affordances that offer “an added layer of flexibility by allowing for flows of information, communication, and content while users are physically in motion and/or carrying out their normal, and not so normal, affairs and activities.”11 Campbell’s assessment of the technology is accurate—mobile devices do enable constant connectivity—but this technological affordance does not determine use or explain why people use them in particular contexts. Campbell’s concept of “network privatism” suggests that we look to our mobile devices for comfort and familiarity, but the history of the procrastination economy shows that we have always looked to media to fulfill this desire. Contextualizing mobile device use as part of the history of site-specific media more accurately explains how the technology extends social and cultural practices.

The History of the Procrastination Economy

The pervasiveness of personal mobile devices has brought new attention to our everyday routines. Yet, compared to leisure and recreational pursuits, the activities we enjoy when “killing time,” multitasking, or procrastinating are often dismissed as ephemera. Cultural critics and academics treat the cinema, television, and video games as art forms worthy of analysis, while procrastination is the domain of efficiency experts, a bad habit to be corrected. Despite the stigma, accounts of mobile media use throughout history reveal the sophisticated ways different technologies have allowed people to weave entertainment properties, telecommunication, and art into their everyday lives. The history of the procrastination economy shows that mobile technologies have always been used for productivity, recreation, and socializing appropriate to particular social and spatial politics. At the same time, marketing and media companies have targeted the procrastination economy in an attempt to monetize these mobile habits. The pursuit of the mobile audience informs the development of products and services. The history of the procrastination economy is one in which people have consistently used mobile technologies to assert their agency in public space, while media companies have supported this desire and privileged those audiences who most often turn to mobile media in their in-between moments.

Books

The history of mobile media culture begins with the first mobile media technology, books. The historian Sydney Shep explains, “Unlike cave paintings, stelae, totems or monuments, the material form of the book is a fundamentally portable communication technology.”12 In Shep’s estimation, the portability of the book enabled globalization; it facilitated the transport of revolutionary ideas and injected media into everyday life.13 The power of this portable media was also seen as a danger, particularly for women, who were considered weak-willed and susceptible to retreating from reality via reading. Even more distressing to early cultural critics was the concern that people could steal away with a book and, unsupervised, encounter lewd ideas or dangerous notions. These concerns resulted in the banning of books—a practice designed to ensure that any books people privately enjoyed would be wholesome and safe.14

The desire to regulate the use of mobile media for the sake of the public good is one that reoccurs throughout the history of mobile media. Censors could control the content of mobile media but not how that content was used. Reading in public spaces presented a number of opportunities for people to navigate the politics of public space. Mary Hammond notes that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “reading in public spaces such as train carriages serve[d] a number of social functions, from avoiding the gazes of predatory fellow-passengers to advertising one’s literary taste.”15 The history of books makes clear that people use mobile technology intentionally to negotiate their relationships to public spaces despite efforts to regulate usage. The act of bringing a book to a public space can be threatening to the status quo because the act of reading signals that a person’s attention and engagement is private and not necessarily aligned with the ideology of his or her surroundings.

Amateur Portables Era

The invention of electronic mobile media devices in the 20th century could only intensify the issues raised by books. As early as the 1910s, radio amateurs were converting military wireless radio technology and consumer electronics to create early portable radios.16 These early “portables” were designed in response to amateur radio contests and were not intended for commercial use.17 The anthropologist Michael Brian Schiffer explains that though the first portables were popular for outdoor activities, such as Boy Scout retreats, they were primarily a curiosity.18 Amateur operators dominated the early history of wireless communication. This largely male community of hobbyists influenced early efforts to expand the capabilities of broadcasting. For this group of pioneers, portable radios were more science experiment than a conduit to culture and conversation.

Entertainment and cultural programming were not broadcast until businesses understood the commercial potential of radio. Throughout the 1920s, consumer products companies such as Crosley Musicone, Outing, and Grebe attempted to capitalize on the public’s love affair with radio by making portable devices for cars, camping trips, and other summertime activities.19 The ability to be in public spaces and reach a faraway place fascinated early adopters. From the beginning, the design of mobile devices was conceived with particular public places in mind, namely, on vacation, in the car, and in nature. The technology may not have been reliable, but the brief portable craze of the 1920s provided a glimpse of Americans’ desire for mobile entertainment to enhance their experience of public spaces.

Transistor Radio Era

Portable radios became more technologically advanced in the 1930s and 1940s, as the components became smaller, but the devices did not become truly popular until the invention of the transistor in the early 1950s. Transistors replaced the bulkier and more energy-intensive Audion tubes, making portable radios inexpensive and long lasting. The end of the Second World War, the development of America’s automobile culture, and the beginnings of teen-focused marketing had a massive effect on mobile media. Portable radios provided people with a sense of independence and control over space, as it enabled people to fill their surroundings with music. The rise of the teen audience changed the music industry, as record labels began making rock ’n’ roll music that teens could conceal from their parents via personal headphones.20 Schiffer writes, “The shirt-pocket portable or, simply, the transistor (as it was called then) became a metaphor for freedom and independence; the right to express, in music and in things, the style and tastes of youth.”21 The popularity and utility of the transistor to youth audiences came as a surprise to manufacturers that originally thought these devices would be too expensive for young people and targeted adults instead.22 Teens’ desire for control and the ability to evade adult supervision guided the design of mobile devices. Not only did the needs of the audience dictate the direction of the technology, but the aesthetics of the music adjusted to be more conducive to headphones.23 Throughout the late 1950s, portable-radio makers such as Zenith directed their advertising to American teens by inserting the devices in teen hangouts like the soda shop.24 As American radio makers competed with Japanese companies, prices dropped, and portable radios became ubiquitous by the end of the 1960s.25

Transistor radios concealed music and allowed listeners to create a “soundscape” to accompany their movements through the world. The composer Murray Schafer initially described soundscapes as an urban-planning concept that can be deployed to institutionalize and organize public space.26 The mobile device allows the listener to make his or her own soundscape, potentially against institutional design. Mobile devices provide both a customizable and a clandestine audio experience while also giving listeners a sense of control over their surroundings. Shuhei Hosokawa has found that this customization and feeling of autonomy provided by portable radios only increased as mobile devices evolved from transistors to the cassette players of the 1980s.27 Hosokawa explains that the feeling of autonomy provided by mobile devices is most obviously observed in the way people move through public space. The listener’s soundscape can augment his or her bodily experience and can affect the listener’s gait and passage through space.28 Thus, listening to a mobile device provides the user with an enhanced reality and the power to choose a route through everyday life.

Portable TV Era

Portable television devices also provided a similar sense of control and autonomy over public space but with an added visual element. Spigel describes a 1967 Sony advertisement for portable television that compares mobile viewing to the romantic intimacy of the drive-in movie.29 The Sony ad offered this fantasy as a way of differentiating portable television from its more domesticated older sibling. The appeal and the target demogr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. The Procrastination Economy and the Mobile Day Part
• 2. The Workplace: Snacks and Flows
• 3. The Commute: “Smart” Cars and Tweets from Trains
• 4. The Waiting Room: Profiting from Boredom
• 5. The “Connected” Living Room: The Idiot Box Gets a Diploma
• Conclusion: The Procrastination Economy in the Era of Ubiquitous Computing and the Internet of Things
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author