The Procrastination Economy. Ethan Tussey
Game Boy was a handheld iteration of Nintendo’s 1980 platform Game and Watch, which was designed with the needs of the mobile gamer in mind. According to the game studies scholar Samuel Tobin, Nintendo’s creative team saw Game and Watch as a way to “mitigate and recast modern urban boredom.”46 The inspiration for the Game and Watch occurred to video game designer Gunpei Yokoi when he observed “tired and bored commuters playing with their calculators.”47 Tobin remarks on the intentionality of the Game Boy design: “the Game Boy not only was well matched to its market, but … it also contributed to calling into being the contexts of its play by redefining how people dealt with commuting, standing in line, and passing time in waiting rooms, at the dinner table, in the bedroom, and in the interstices of work and school day.”48 It is clear from this statement that Nintendo was deeply engaged with the context of gameplay, which is a major feature of the procrastination economy that defines later mobile media devices.
Mobile Phone Era
First generation portable phones, affectionately known as “bricks,” were neither widely adopted nor paid much attention by American consumers. Second-generation cell phones did resonate with consumers because they offered new textual, informational, and digital ways of talking with others. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, multimedia mobile phones began to reach the marketplace. Unlike portable game devices, the decision to develop additional functionality on mobile phones was less related to the needs of the consumer and more related to the efforts of electronics companies to diversify and compete in a growing marketplace. In accordance with the International Mobile Telecommunications Act of 2000, 3G (third-generation) infrastructure became an industry standard. 3G networks offered expanded bandwidth, which in turn offered the opportunity to enhance the capabilities of mobile phones. Phone companies identified multimedia functionality, such as text messaging, as a way to capitalize on these enhancements. The media and communications scholar Gerard Goggin points out that the phone embodied the digital era’s concept of multimedia as it expanded communication from voice to text, image, sound, and touch.49 Text messaging was an especially popular enhancement, offering a clandestine language between friends that could be hidden from those who were not in the know. As has been the theme with mobile devices, this illicit and titillating usage was particularly attractive to young people, who were among the earliest adopters of text messaging. Texting also became integral to new forms of interactive television, for example, voting via text for a favorite performer on Fox’s American Idol reality-TV singing competition.
Goggin notes that media coverage about the adoption of mobile phones renewed concerns over the breakdown between public and private spheres.50 As Larissa Hjorth and Ingrid Richardson note, “the domestic, private, and personal become quite literally mobilised and micro-mediatised via the mobile phone—an intimate ‘home-in-the-hand’—effecting at the same time a transformation of experiences of presence, telepresence.”51 In many ways, the mobile phone expands on the concept of “privatized mobility” presented by Spigel by offering a way to speak to the world from the comfort of the mobile-private sphere of the phone.
The history of mobile media demonstrates a consistent pattern in which people use mobile media in social situations to improve their surroundings and assert themselves. Mobile devices provide access to entertainment, information, and communication that can change the physical and social dynamics of public spaces. The cultural theorist Michel de Certeau argues that as the divisions of work and leisure continue to break down, people adopt tactics for operating within the confines of their surroundings.52 Cognizant of this history and building on the work of Certeau, this book places mobile devices as part of a lineage of devices that have helped people make meaning within the ideological designs of public spaces, institutions, and media companies. The companies and institutions of the procrastination economy prescribe preferred behavior and social order for the use of mobile devices in everyday life. Modern mobile devices offer people new tactics for navigating this social order. The interplay between the monetization strategies of media companies and the creative tactics of mobile users reflects the struggle for control and meaning making that defines modern life.
The Procrastination Economy: Targeting In-Between Moments and Creating a Mobile Day Part
While consumers enjoy the ways that mobile devices enhance socializing and control over physical space, media companies use these same devices to monetize our in-between moments. Entertainment companies are dedicated to getting consumers to answer boredom with their content and services. Industry metrics such as “engagement” and “ratings” measure which products and services do the best job of capturing consumers’ time and attention. The broadcast industries (television and radio) provide a template for companies targeting the mobile audience because they pioneered the strategy of “day parts” (for example, morning, daytime, prime time, and late night), which match genres, aesthetics, and formats to the perceived needs of people watching at different parts of the workday.
The use of day-part programming inspired scholars such as Nick Browne to analyze programming lineups as evidence of the ways the television industry constructs an ideal spectator and attracts him or her with an ideological argument about everyday life.53 For example, the soap opera genre was designed for the afternoon day part in which producers targeted stay-at-home mothers by creating story lines that could accommodate the interruptions of housework.54 Browne argues that day-part scheduling established television as a cultural institution because it showed that broadcast networks could reflect and reinforce a “socially mediated order of the workday and workweek” and could “mediate between the worlds of work and entertainment.”55 These scheduling strategies framed television as a part of everyday life, with each day part designed to reinforce the divisions between labor and leisure.56
The procrastination economy creates a mobile day part around our in-between moments. The content and programming of the procrastination economy similarly mediate the tension between productivity and entertainment by fashioning a subject position for those who are waiting, procrastinating, and/or killing time. Media companies create content, apps, and services based on the idea that we look to our phones to fill liminal moments. Television and film distributors, cable service providers, and streaming media platforms contribute to the procrastination economy by distributing, repackaging, or expanding their existing storyworlds on mobile apps.57 Social media platforms are also a part of the procrastination economy, as they provide “communitainment,” a term developed by Stuart Cunningham and David Craig to describe the entertainment industries’ efforts to participate in the activities of digital communities and create media content out of the user-generated creativity and communication on social media platforms.58 Mobile-device manufactures and video-game developers contribute to the procrastination economy by creating functionality and capabilities appropriate for specific mobile usage contexts. While often a company will announce a mobile strategy that is simply an effort to translate the leisure economy to mobile devices, the procrastination economy applies to efforts to customize content and services for context-specific mobile usage. Each of the chapters of this book details the ways that media companies are adapting their mobile strategies to focus on particular contexts and audiences. Just as television scholars have analyzed day parts for their underlying ideology, the procrastination economy reveals an industrial belief about the mobile audience.
The companies that contribute to the mobile day part also contribute to definition of the ideal audience of the procrastination economy. The pursuit of this audience informs the functionality, content, and services for mobile devices. The preferred audience of the procrastination economy has much in common with the “commodity audience” described in Eileen Meehan’s work on television ratings.59 In this essay, Meehan analyzes the historical development of television ratings to explain how macroeconomic structures shape decisions about programming and understanding of the audience.60 Focusing on the macroeconomic analysis provides evidence that the television industry’s “forms of measurement are selected on the basis of economic goals, not according to the rules of social science.”61 As with ratings, media industries’ efforts to understand the mobile audience are framed by their desire to monetize the procrastination economy. For example, Elizabeth Evans points out that those mobile video games are predominantly funded by the freemium business model, which capitalizes on gamers’ impatience.62 Freemium games allow anyone to play free of charge (or with advertisements) but offer gamers with disposable income the ability to bypass the structured