The Procrastination Economy. Ethan Tussey
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 employees planned their lunchtime around real-time 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