news and sports programs. One employee enjoyed taking part in live chats hosted by the media personality Joe Rogan, a comedian and UFC announcer. This employee timed his lunch break to coincide with the airing of the live chat. Sports personalities and sporting events are particularly popular digital content in the workplace, since sporting events occur throughout the day across the globe. During the 2008 Olympics, Nielsen reported that 20% of the “active at work audience” viewed events during the workday.30 Similarly, the 2006 FIFA World Cup drew nearly four billion page views during its day game broadcasts of the global soccer tournament.31 Sports leagues and television networks hungry for larger audiences (and therefore larger advertising revenues) have made deals with European football leagues, which have matches that begin during the morning and afternoon during US workdays.32 These streaming-media deals create the midday media snacks that workplace audiences build their days around.
These examples of lunchtime viewing show how mobile devices expand the options and mobility of the benefits of the office break room. Missing the previous evening’s “must-see TV” used to exclude an employee from office conversations; with so much content available on-demand and from streaming platforms, work colleagues can catch each other up on the shows they collectively enjoy. Mobile devices also allow those who may not connect with their colleagues with a way to connect with people outside the office. These devices enable these workers to avoid the social politics of the break room while still enjoying the benefits of relaxation in the middle of the day. The streaming services and social media platforms provide the media snacks that people want during lunchtime.
Break Time
Media snacks help employees focus to begin the day and provide relief in the middle of the day, but they can also act as rewards for completing a task. A number of employees at the three companies explained that they set goals for themselves to finish a task within a given timeframe, and if they met this goal, they rewarded themselves with a media snack, such as a few YouTube videos, before starting another assignment. Management in some workplaces contributes to this work-and-reward system. For example, the management of the call center incentivized its employees by adjusting the network firewall as an incentive for employees who met particular production quotas. The call center’s firewall allowed employees to browse the Internet for non-work-related sites for a set amount of time throughout the day. If an employee completed a high volume of calls during a set time, then the firewall restrictions were relaxed and allowed the employee more time to visit non-work-related sites. Research on cyberslacking prohibitions, such as firewalls and monitoring software, shows that these measures reduce media snacking.33 These kinds of restrictions can also reduce employees’ morale and foster a sense of surveillance and distrust.34 While this management implemented a reward system focused on the firewall on employees’ desktop computers, workers often ignored these restrictions by using their mobile devices to give themselves a media-snacking reward system.
Yvonne Jewkes’s research on prison inmates shows that when media access is used as a reward, it helps to normalize the rules and regulations of the institution.35 As with any incentive system, the group that controls the object of desire, such as access to media content, can require certain behaviors from the people who want the object. The research on prisoners also shows that media content is essential to a person’s perception of him- or herself. Jewkes argues that within strict institutions, media content provides people with essential tools to reclaim their identities, mark time, and generally survive day-to-day stresses. Hopefully, most work environments are not as damaging to personal agency as prison is, although the restriction of media content in some workplaces may be similar. Unlike in prison, mobile-device viewing in the workplace, during break times, can be a negotiation between employee and employer. The employee agrees to abide by the structures of professionalism in exchange for some measure of freedom to engage in media consumption and, therefore, personal expression during his or her managed break times.
Break times are self-selected or scheduled moments during the day when employees are permitted to divert their minds from work to topics of their own interest. Despite the lack of federally mandated break times, several state governments and various unions have successfully instituted compensated break times for workers. These regulating bodies have argued that break times perform an important stress-relieving function.36 Researchers at the University of Melbourne demonstrated that employees who spent break time online were more productive than were employees who spent their break offline.37 Study coauthor Brent Coker explains that “short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the Internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a day’s work, and as a result, increased productivity.”38 Another study by researchers at the University of Singapore compared media snacking to a “coffee or snack break,” as it provided pleasure and rejuvenation to employees.39 These findings show that media snacking is as restorative as other break time activities are.
Much like lunchtime media snacking, employees in the three companies were strategic in their planning of their media snack breaks. One employee would check to see what his favorite online personalities had scheduled during the day and would plan his break times accordingly. He used Twitter, for example, to see if a comedian would be hosting a live chat or to see if a new episode of a favorite web series would be posted. If there was no time-sensitive digital content, break times were filled with casual web surfing in short breaks throughout the day. Employees at the call center often returned to social media sites throughout the day, sometimes as frequently as every 20 minutes, to see if any new updates had been posted. These employees claimed that their total visits to these sites spread throughout the day totaled the 15–20 minutes they were allowed for daily break time. By spacing out the media snacking at regular intervals, the employees gave themselves a number of rewards throughout the day. As one employee explained, “You can’t keep constantly working, nonstop, on work like this. You gotta take breaks.”40 The association between the type of work, in this case computer coding, and the need for media snacking has appeared in additional research on workplace Internet use.41 The repetitiveness and monotony of certain types of modern work make employees look for media snacks as a reward for completing tasks.
Break times are not just for personal restoration; they are also opportunities to socialize with coworkers. The symbol of workplace socializing is the watercooler, a place to discuss the previous weekend’s happenings and gossip about office politics. The association between watercoolers and workplace socializing is so strong that HBO created an entire advertising campaign with the premise that its shows were watercooler worthy.42 The campaign reflected the way coworkers discuss a previous night’s television programs. Digital technology has enhanced watercooler media discussions by providing tools for facilitating conversation. Before on-demand viewing and mobile devices, watercooler conversation depended on all participants having watched a particular program on a particular night; nowadays, when someone misses a memorable moment in a show, he or she can access it via digital resources. If television plays a central role as society’s common language, as television scholars have argued, digital media take things a step further by providing an easy way for fans to reminisce about a favorite movie or show, research a rumor, or create new fans by converting the uninitiated around a mobile device.43 Because digital content is more easily accessible than broadcast content is, nearly everyone in the office can participate in the watercooler conversation. In this way, the conversation becomes more inclusive, more diverse, and richer as a result.
The desire to discuss common interests during break time was broadly evident during my workplace visits. A colleague-to-colleague conversation about a video game or a YouTube video would often be overheard by other coworkers and would suddenly grow into several employees gathered together around a mobile device, where they would watch (or rewatch) the media object en masse. A prime example of this phenomenon occurred in the Latitude 34 offices. One day during observation, several of the employees decided to incorporate movie and television dialog into their regular conversations. At one point during a conversation involving lines from South Park, the employees repeatedly described the work they were collaborating on as “super cereal.” (This phrase is a reference to the South Park episode “ManBearPig.”) One of the employees was not familiar with that episode, so another employee described the episode and then
