subscribe to these services in order to fill their in-between moments with streaming video. Marketers develop strategies to integrate their brands in the social interactions of those who will proselytize for their products via Snapchat “lenses,” emoji keyboards, and GIF generators. Social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter develop such interfaces as News Feed and Moments to simplify mobile navigation and make it easier to see advertisements when people communicate with friends during breaks in the day. Apple and Samsung develop hardware and software on their mobile devices, such as Background Playback, to ensure that people can use their Apple Music, Spotify, or Tidal music subscriptions while they multitask in their in-between moments. Whether through content, marketing, or functionality, media companies are monetizing the procrastination economy by focusing on the habits of mobile users that are most amenable to subscription services, micropayments, and marketing.
Industry Studies + Site-Specific Analysis + Software Studies
Researching the procrastination economy requires an understanding of how people use mobile devices in particular contexts. Lynn Spigel and Anna McCarthy have demonstrated methods for analyzing media technologies in context.33 Both scholars publish research that defines media in relation to the strategies of media corporations, the capabilities of media technologies, and people’s use of media within particular contexts. McCarthy advocates for a site-specific approach that provides scholars with stable footing for understanding how spatial dynamics influence public reception. Spigel similarly considers the politics of space as a lens for documenting the domestication of emerging technology, but she combines this analysis with discourse analysis of articles from industry trade publications and the popular press. Following these approaches, this book defines the procrastination economy by examining the rhetoric, regulations, and programming that create the institutional logic of four unique spaces: work, the commute, the waiting room, and the “connected” living room. In addition, each chapter of the book provides accounts of user activity within these spaces on the basis of ethnographic analysis of particular sites and evidence of user-generated content within these sites.
The site-specific research presented in this book pairs with analysis of the software and hardware that make the procrastination economy possible. The field of new media theory provides a research tradition to explain how certain technological affordances relate to patterns of use and the establishment of power relations between consumers and producers.34 The technological affordances of mobile media devices are determined by the fundamentals of digital technology, the infrastructure that enables communication, the software that shapes the user experience, and the hardware that people hold in their hands. New media scholars such as Alexander Galloway and Lev Manovich have argued that lines of code and the language of digital technology itself have ideological restrictions that favor certain uses over others, including database logic, customization, and personalization.35 Others, such as Yochai Benkler and Pierre Levy, see the decentralized online network of digital communication as one that favors democracy and collaboration and that challenges the economic position of traditional media companies.36 Beyond hardware, a layer of software provides a frame for accessing and distributing thoughts and ideas. Scholarship by Ian Bogost and Jose Van Dijck point to the ways in which software enables certain uses of mobile devices and describes those uses’ attending ideologies.37 At their most reductive, these new media theories tend toward technological determinism. Combining these theories with context-based analysis of economic forces leads to a nuanced depiction of the procrastination economy.
In addition, each chapter provides an analysis of the media industries that create the content and services of the procrastination economy. Drawing from the field of media industries studies, the research in these chapters examines industry trade discourse, distribution contracts, and production cultures as evidence of the ways creative workers understand the mobile audience and the mobile “day part.” Media industries studies as defined by the work of Alisa Perren, Jennifer Holt, Vicki Mayer, and John T. Caldwell argues that looking at self-reflexive discourse within the media industries provides traces of the creative process and assumptions about media consumers.38 Adopting these methodologies requires discourse analysis, analysis of technology trade shows, and an understanding of the business models and challenges facing content production, distribution, and exhibition. Accordingly, the research in this book incorporates industry trade publications as well as interviews with media industries workers that focus on the procrastination economy. A consideration of culture of the media industries provides insights into which affordances of mobile technology are nurtured and adopted and which are muted. The use of a media industries approach is particularly important as producers are experiencing a changing relationship with the audience thanks to digital technologies. As media companies arrive at an understanding about the mobile audience, they set the parameters and expectations for their engagement with the audience. Applying media industries approaches to the study of the procrastination economy reveals how media companies come to understand the mobile audience.
Through these approaches, this book argues that mobile media devices are at the forefront of the power struggle between a digitally empowered audience and the media conglomerates that seek to harness and commercialize online behavior. There is a tendency for scholars to describe the emerging online entertainment market either as an opportunity for audiences to wrest control from traditional distributors or as a moment when international conglomerates colonize mobile screens and provide users with a false sense of empowerment.39 Key to the debate is the question of who benefits from the ways the Internet facilitates the flow of culture and information across the globe. Scholars such as Yochai Benkler see the decentralized nature of digital technology and the culture of collaboration that has defined online interaction as a sign that digital technology will foster bottom-up “folk” culture, free from the institutional influences that have made other mass media so manipulative.40 Other scholars such as Manuel Castells look at digital technology in terms of economic realities and conclude that the culture of the Internet is actually fostering neoliberal principles that ultimately serve the media conglomerates.41
The public use of mobile devices is ideal for examining the political potential of a new technology. Mobile usage in public space is a moment when people use technology to navigate the private/public divide through the products and services of the procrastination economy.42 I do not accept the dichotomy that sometimes splits cultural studies from political economic analysis; rather, I embrace the spatial approach that brings together the macro-analysis of the media industries and micro-analysis of cultural objects in specific contexts. The procrastination economy reveals conflict between audiences’ desire for greater control over content and the industries’ attempts to restrict control and maintain or establish revenue streams.43 The friction points in these negotiations have material influence on the use of culture in our daily lives. Analyzing these points, such as access to content on mobile devices or the quality of a streaming video clip, exposes the media industries’ challenges as they attempt to integrate digital entertainment into their existing media operations. Analyzing the actions of the mobile media audience, entertainment studios, digital distribution divisions, television producers, and web companies provides a way of understanding the creation and consumption of online media culture. The research presented in this book shows that certain audiences and industries have more influence over our understanding of mobile media culture than others do but that the meaning of mobile media culture is ever changing as the technologies and businesses of the procrastination economy continue to evolve.
The site-specific analysis in the following chapters focuses on the in-between spaces separating private and public life. The theorist Marc Augé calls these spaces “non-places” and claims they are important sites for understanding modern identity.44 According to Augé, the modern global citizen feels most at home in these non-places because they are similarly designed no matter where one is in the world. Adriana de Souza e Silva argues that using a mobile device in these non-places makes them a “hybrid space,” at once virtual and corporeal.45 Still more abstract is Mackenzie Wark’s concept of “telesthesia,” which suggests that our sense of location is mediated through the global flows of media; thus, these non-spaces only become specific through the ways they are represented by the media content that people can access in them.46 For example, the sound studies scholar Michael Bull points to the ways
