Michael Bull has written about his concern over the use of headphones and portable media devices, claiming that these devices put people in their own “private bubble” and cut them off from their surroundings, as “sound enables users to manage and orchestrate their spaces of habituation in a manner that conforms to their desires. The sound of the personal stereo is direct, with headphones placed directly over the ears of the user, thereby overlaying the random sounds of the environment passed through with privatized sounds.”18 One employee remarked that his choice of music depends on who is in the room. When a fellow programmer with a shared sensibility is working near him, he puts on a song they both enjoy, and this provides a consistent background beat. If there are not multiple people in the office to share the music, he is more likely to put on his headphones and listen to a podcast related to his interests. In this instance, the ability to customize and stream music through digital services encourages a connection between coworkers; when working solo, the programmer uses sound to alleviate his isolation.
The ability to personalize a workday soundtrack is one of the ways mobile devices have enhanced everyday office practices. Before the Internet, the options for “white noise” were limited to media that were playable on a personal stereo. Smartphones and other mobile devices enable catalogs of content to travel with an employee into the workplace. Barbara Klinger, drawing on the work of Roger Silverstone, has argued that the proliferation of home entertainment products has expanded the role of media texts within our daily lives.19 Though she mainly focuses on home viewing, she describes repeat viewing of media texts as part of an intense process of personalization in which a text can help “confirm individual identity.”20 The workplace is another venue where people are actively engaged in this identity exploration, and digital content’s inherent portability and customizability supports that practice.21 A favorite film or television show may contain dialog or a soundtrack that is reaffirming to an employee, but, being sufficiently familiar, it does not distract from work-related tasks. These media snacks become a form of audio pleasure that serve multiple purposes: they provide pleasant background noise, allow employees to assert control over their workday, and give employees a way to express their identities through their media consumption choices.
Lunch
Musical media snacks help concentration and motivate employees to start the day, but by lunchtime, employees are hungry for more relaxing and communal media snacks. Mobile devices offer mobility and community that surpasses the offerings of traditional break rooms and the limitations of modern labor schedules. Employees within the service industry do not leave for lunch together because someone is required to stay and answer phones or continue working. (The Latitude 34 offices were an exception to this; employees were often out on service calls during the lunch hour and could stop for food as they went from assignment to assignment.) The inability to go to lunch as a group and the pressure to finish work tasks within a strict timetable encourage many employees to eat lunch at their desks, whether lunch is brought from home or purchased outside the office and brought back. Cultural critics have debated the merits of “desk-eating”; some claim that leaving the office during lunch is an important restorative act, while others argue that the demands of the modern workday and family life have made a leisurely lunch impossible.22 Consuming digital content while desk-dining constitutes a compromise: employees get a short break from the workday but also have the convenience of staying at the desk, ready to respond should a problem arise.
Lunchtime relaxation has been a part of the procrastination economy ever since employees lobbied for break-room televisions in the 1950s. Mobile devices improve on break-room televisions by enabling on-demand viewing and mobility. Anna McCarthy describes the way much “site-specific” media, like break-room televisions, are typically controlled by employers and not by visitors, customers, or employees.23 She argues that group viewing in such places as taverns is largely about the institutional expectations of public viewing. For example, the viewing of sports in bars is partly a response to the social understanding of public viewing as a separate space for male audiences away from the more feminized space of the home.24 Workplace viewing transcends these boundaries, bringing fan communities together around shared interests, instead of forcing a confrontation over office hierarchy and remote-control privileges.
Mobile devices make “break rooms” mobile, as they allow employees to customize their relaxation and their viewing partners. While this mobility points to the isolation that some people see as the downfall of mobile privatization, the effect is context specific. Not all companies have break rooms, and not all break rooms are inviting places of camaraderie. Anna-Lisa Linden and Maria Nyberg describe the office break room as a place of self-presentation in which diverse ethnicities and social classes collide and draw conclusions about their coworkers’ personal lives.25 Mobile devices help workers navigate this social anxiety while allowing them to get the relaxing benefits of the break room. Indeed, break rooms are defined by constraints, from the time one has to prepare one’s lunch to the options on the break-room television to the company one keeps while having one’s lunch.
Mobile devices exponentially expand an employee’s options for lunchtime viewing and give the individual control over the viewing experience. If a group of employees wants to discuss something that happened in a recent TV episode, they can watch (or rewatch) together, pausing and rewinding to allow for conversation without missing any of the action. This enhanced group-viewing experience increases the likelihood of creating workplace-based fan communities. A group of coworkers at Ameravant, watching The Daily Show during lunch, paused the show when a joke about current events elicited a laugh from one person and confusion from another. The coworkers kept the program paused while they discussed the political events referenced in the joke. In this instance, the show was more than just a lunchtime distraction; it was part of a social meaning-making and community-building process. The ability to control the on-demand content through the rewind and pause functionality provided a sense of control in a context that is typically defined by constraints.
Unlike other types of fan viewing, in which people come together organically over a shared interest, a workplace contains people with widely varying tastes and interests. Dorothy Hobson has written about the importance of workplace fan communities as a crucial site for the meaning-making process that accompanies television viewing.26 Her analysis shows that many community-viewing practices, such as bonding and catching up, also occurred around the office watercooler, well before the advent of digital technology. Media devices make it easier to find something to discuss that has office-wide appeal and is available on demand for lunchtime viewing. In this way, workplace viewing resembles the practices of family viewing, in which different members of the family establish hierarchies of taste and negotiate to determine what is viewed.27 Workplace fan communities are also similar to a high school lunchroom: different cliques break off and assemble to discuss or, in the case of digital content, engage in a shared interest. Office-based fan communities are context based; shared interests reveal themselves through office interaction with digital media.
The selection of The Daily Show as a shared community text reveals how context-based fandom operates. According to audience statistics, The Daily Show appeals to young, educated, and technologically savvy viewers.28 The 20-something programmers at Ameravant fit this profile. The show’s humor, running time, and “online/anytime” availability made it a good fit for the context of the Ameravant office. Many of the workers at Ameravant shared political leanings that matched those expressed on The Daily Show. They also shared a desire to watch a show each day that lasted the length of a lunch break. By contrast, workers at the call center were much less likely to watch digital content together at lunchtime. The diversity of perspectives in the call center, the variety of lunchtimes, and the high turnover of employees made the environment more isolated. Yet they could still look to social media platforms to find community during lunch time. A Pew study found that social media services are most often accessed at work during break times.29 In all cases, lunchtime media snacking involved streaming-media platforms and a desire for community and socializing.
While mobile devices offer control over how employees enjoy their media snacks, the variety of options, including live streaming events, influenced when employees at the three companies took their lunches. Several of the
