The Procrastination Economy. Ethan Tussey
4 describes how this economic strategy reflects the media industries’ understanding of the procrastination economy of the waiting room. Indeed, each chapter describes how macroeconomic efforts to monetize mobile devices through micropayments, advertising, and subscription services influence media companies’ efforts to serve the procrastination economy.
Understanding the macroeconomic realities behind the procrastination economy is crucial, as mobile devices become a dominant conduit to the Internet. The development of the procrastination economy coincides with the commercial turn of the Internet. The media scholar Jonathan Zittrain has argued that the “generative” spirit that defined the early days of the Internet is disappearing as media industries establish digital business models.63 In the August 2010 issue of Wired, editor Chris Anderson and writer Michael Wolff argued that the World Wide Web had finally reached its commercial stage of development. They explain that the rise of mobile computing privileges “semi-closed platforms that use the Internet for transport but not the browser for display,” simplifying web navigation and creating convenient delivery systems.64 The emergence of this more convenient and commercially viable Internet brings with it the standardization of certain norms around Internet use, in this case the privileging of the procrastination economy.
Smartphone Era
The release of the iPhone in 2007 was a landmark moment in the development of the procrastination economy, as it introduced mobile devices as multitasking devices that could assist the busy consumer. An Apple press release the day before the launch of the iPhone touted it as a device that “redefines what users can do on their mobile phones” by combining three products: “a mobile phone, a widescreen iPod and the Internet.”65 While Apple’s initial marketing campaign focused on the variety of tasks the iPhone could complete, the second series of advertisements from 2007 featured testimonials from iPhone users.66 Particularly relevant to the procrastination economy, was an advertisement featuring “Elliot” relaying a story about a time he was attending a dinner and trying to remember the name of his boss’s fiancée.67 In the commercial, Elliot describes how he used his iPhone while waiting for his boss to arrive to search for the name of his fiancée on the Internet. Several other advertisements, including ones featuring entrepreneurs, people settling a bet, Facebook users, and a pilot on a weather delay, situate the phone as a tool for navigating the in-between moments of everyday life.
The capabilities of smartphones affected Internet companies and social media platforms, as they hurried to optimize their sites for mobile use. Facebook has been a popular destination for the mobile audience since the arrival of smartphones, developing a mobile platform in 2006. Later that year, Facebook introduced its News Feed feature that redesigned the functionality of the site to act as a personalized “news aggregator that reports on activity in a user’s social network and highlights relevant information about people, activities they have been involved in and other information they have chosen to share.”68 News Feed has been called “the most significant invention in the history of the social web,” and this is especially true for the procrastination economy, as it became the de facto design for social networking on mobile devices.69 Before News Feed, Facebook users actively sought out the status updates of their friends. After the redesign, all status updates were delivered to the user in an automatically updating content stream, which contributed to the procrastination economy in two important ways. First, it effectively changed the business model on social media sites from page views to advertising-sponsored social interaction.70 Second, simplifying the navigation of Facebook made the platform a reliable mobile app for checking in with friends during the in-between moments of the day. Advertisers could now target those in-between moments and make their appeals context specific. While the redesign initially inspired outrage, it did not affect users’ enthusiasm for Facebook, as it has consistently been a top-used mobile app.71 In addition, the interface design and advertising business model became standard strategies for defining and reaching the mobile audience.
As Internet platforms optimized their sites for mobile devices, film studios, television networks, and brand managers began to see smartphones as a new screen for their intellectual property. For example, Warner Bros. Home Entertainment group created a special division for digital distribution in 2007.72 Warner Bros. Home Entertainment is tasked with packaged media (DVDs and Blu-rays), electronic sell-through (on-demand and downloadable files), and designing digital platforms and tools (games and social media promotions) to support its media properties. In 2011, the division purchased Flixster, the company that owns the movie-review site Rotten Tomatoes.73 Warner’s digital team designed a mobile app using Flixster’s branding and database of reviews. The app provided users with access to digital copies of their collection, reviews of films, management of their Netflix queue, and discovery tools that helped mobile customers find movie tickets and information. Chuck Tryon describes the app as an attempt to offer consumers “platform mobility,” or access to their media collection from any device.74 Whether through the Flixster app or in Warner Bros. experiments on Facebook,75 iTunes,76 or BitTorrent,77 the consistent relationship the company cultivated with the digital audience was the promise that they would be able to watch film and television on the go. The focus on mobile access to content emerged from an effort to apply the strategies of home entertainment to the mobile audience.78 While these digital distribution efforts often ignore context-specific use, media companies also produce a number of paratexts and ephemeral media such as promotional clips, branded apps, emoji keyboards, and GIF generators that are more conducive to the specifics of the procrastination economy. No matter the intention, these products and services are the services people use during their in-between moments.
The procrastination economy has flourished in the era of smartphones and Internet-connected mobile devices because these technologies blur the lines between work and leisure. Tryon’s concept of “platform mobility” and Lynn Spigel and Max Dawson’s description of “flexible leisure” describe industry efforts to position mobile media as an all-you-can-eat buffet at which consumers can help themselves at any time or place.79 Contrastingly, the procrastination economy details the entertainment industries’ efforts to entice the mobile audience to fill their downtime with context specific “snackable” content and social media conversation. To continue with the metaphor, the products and services of the procrastination economy are the media equivalent of the snack-food industry.
Spigel and Dawson see the “ ‘social arrhythmia’ of the new 24/7/365 post-industrial information economy” as inciting television networks to give up on their familiar day parts and strategic targeting of audiences on the basis of the eight-hour workday.80 While there have been changes to the workday and increased demands on consumers’ attention, entertainment companies still attempt to define the context of the mobile spectator. Whereas Spigel and Dawson see “flexible leisure” as the logic behind on-demand content, a closer look at the media industries’ efforts reveals that day-part programming is alive and well. The procrastination economy is filled with examples of content and services purposefully designed to target the media snacking habits of people at work, in the waiting room, during the commute, and in the “connected” living room. On-demand services give consumers some control over how and when they use content, but media companies still make decisions about curation and accessibility. The chapters that follow demonstrate how digital platforms deploy strategies based on beliefs about consumers’ behavior in particular spatial contexts. As a result, mobile devices are defined by the logics of the procrastination economy.
2
The Workplace
Snacks and Flows
The midday spike in Web traffic is not a new phenomenon, but media companies have started responding in a meaningful way over the last year. They are creating new shows, timing the posts to coincide with hunger pangs. And they are rejiggering the way they sell advertising online, recognizing that noontime programs can command a premium.
—Brian Stetler, “Noontime Web Video Revitalizes Lunch at Desk,” New York Times, January 5, 2008
As the Internet became a common workplace tool in the 1990s, the New York Times, like the majority of news outlets, circulated stories about the dangers of “cyberslacking,” which included such observations as “surfing the Net, it seems, can make the desktop computer anything but an