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The Procrastination Economy and the Mobile Day Part

Comedian Louis C.K. often aims his acerbic wit at mobile phones and their users. Expressing concern about the technology, he claims it provides constant distractions that keep people from facing the realities of life: “That’s why we text and drive. I look around, pretty much 100 percent of the people driving are texting. And they’re killing, everybody’s murdering each other with their cars. But people are willing to risk taking a life and ruining their own because they don’t want to be alone for a second because it’s so hard.”1 C.K.’s humor reflects concerns about media technologies that have occupied scholars for decades. Media and communications technologies change our relationship with the outside world by blurring the division between public and private life. Evaluating the technological affordance of television, Raymond Williams used the concept of “mobile privatization” to describe the ways television enabled people to enter public life from the comfort of their home.2 In an analysis of portable television, Lynn Spigel flipped Williams’s term to “privatized mobility” to describe how mobile devices enable people to bring the comforts of home to public spaces.3 People enjoy privatized mobility every time they use their mobile devices to access their personal media collections or have a private conversation in public spaces. Critics of mobile devices see these activities as a cocoon that separates people from the outside world.4

The fact that mobile devices often act as a barrier to public interaction leads people to see mobile technology as detrimental to empathy and community. The cultural theorist Jonathan Sterne equates mobile devices with increased individualism, as people can use these devices to customize their experience of public spaces.5 Michael Bull claims that mobile devices create an “audio bubble” that physically separates people from their fellow citizens.6 A substantial amount of research on mobile devices has focused on the question of the effects of mobile devices on social interactions.7 Zizi Papacharissi’s work sees mobile devices as offering a retreat to a private sphere where people can feel comfortable engaging with public life.8 For Papacharissi, mobile device use in public space is a political act in which people assert their autonomy by “sustain[ing] existing relationships and creat[ing] new ones.”9 Scott Campbell’s research confirms some of Papacharissi’s arguments, as he finds that mobile devices offer “network privatism” by supporting strong relationships and hindering weak relationships.10 Essentially, these devices make it easier to stay connected with our loved ones while also helping us disconnect from our immediate surroundings.

Mobile devices amplify and enhance preexisting behaviors and tactics for navigating public space. If we focus on the procrastination economy, mobile devices are positioned in the appropriate spatial and historical context. Media technologies have long been used to fill our downtime, and modern mobile devices are a part of this history. Only by understanding this history does the procrastination economy emerge as the dominant logic that supports mobile use and the monetization efforts that attempt to profit on those habits. Scholars tend to overlook the contextual factors in favor of an examination of the technological affordances of mobile devices. For example, Campbell contends that mobile devices, smartphones in particular, have affordances that offer “an added layer of flexibility by allowing for flows of information, communication, and content while users are physically in motion and/or carrying out their normal, and not so normal, affairs and activities.”11 Campbell’s assessment of the technology is accurate—mobile devices do enable constant connectivity—but this technological affordance does not determine use or explain why people use them in particular contexts. Campbell’s concept of “network privatism” suggests that we look to our mobile devices for comfort and familiarity, but the history of the procrastination economy shows that we have always looked to media to fulfill this desire. Contextualizing mobile device use as part of the history of site-specific media more accurately explains how the technology extends social and cultural practices.

The History of the Procrastination Economy

The pervasiveness of personal mobile devices has brought new attention to our everyday routines. Yet, compared to leisure and recreational pursuits, the activities we enjoy when “killing time,” multitasking, or procrastinating are often dismissed as ephemera. Cultural critics and academics treat the cinema, television, and video games as art forms worthy of analysis, while procrastination is the domain of efficiency experts, a bad habit to be corrected. Despite the stigma, accounts of mobile media use throughout history reveal the sophisticated ways different technologies have allowed people to weave entertainment properties, telecommunication, and art into their everyday lives. The history of the procrastination economy shows that mobile technologies have always been used for productivity, recreation, and socializing appropriate to particular social and spatial politics. At the same time, marketing and media companies have targeted the procrastination economy in an attempt to monetize these mobile habits. The pursuit of the mobile audience informs the development of products and services. The history of the procrastination economy is one in which people have consistently used mobile technologies to assert their agency in public space, while media companies have supported this desire and privileged those audiences who most often turn to mobile media in their in-between moments.

Books

The history of mobile media culture begins with the first mobile media technology, books. The historian Sydney Shep explains, “Unlike cave paintings, stelae, totems or monuments, the material form of the book is a fundamentally portable communication technology.”12 In Shep’s estimation, the portability of the book enabled globalization; it facilitated the transport of revolutionary ideas and injected media into everyday life.13 The power of this portable media was also seen as a danger, particularly for women, who were considered weak-willed and susceptible to retreating from reality via reading. Even more distressing to early cultural critics was the concern that people could steal away with a book and, unsupervised, encounter lewd ideas or dangerous notions. These concerns resulted in the banning of books—a practice designed to ensure that any books people privately enjoyed would be wholesome and safe.14

The desire to regulate the use of mobile media for the sake of the public good is one that reoccurs throughout the history of mobile media. Censors could control the content of mobile media but not how that content was used. Reading in public spaces presented a number of opportunities for people to navigate the politics of public space. Mary Hammond notes that at the beginning of the nineteenth century, “reading in public spaces such as train carriages serve[d] a number of social functions, from avoiding the gazes of predatory fellow-passengers to advertising one’s literary taste.”15 The history of books makes clear that people use mobile technology intentionally to negotiate their relationships to public spaces despite efforts to regulate usage. The act of bringing a book to a public space can be threatening to the status quo because the act of reading signals that a person’s attention and engagement is private and not necessarily aligned with the ideology of his or her surroundings.

Amateur Portables Era

The invention of electronic mobile media devices in the 20th century could only intensify the issues raised by books. As early as the 1910s, radio amateurs were converting military wireless radio technology and consumer electronics to create early portable radios.16 These early “portables” were designed in response to amateur radio contests and were not intended for commercial use.17 The anthropologist Michael Brian Schiffer explains that though the first portables were popular for outdoor activities, such as Boy Scout retreats, they were primarily a curiosity.18 Amateur operators dominated the early history of wireless communication. This largely male community of hobbyists influenced early efforts to expand the capabilities of broadcasting. For this group of pioneers, portable radios were more science experiment than a conduit to culture and conversation.

Entertainment and cultural programming were not broadcast until businesses understood the commercial potential of radio. Throughout the 1920s, consumer products companies such as Crosley Musicone, Outing, and Grebe attempted to capitalize on the public’s love affair with radio by making portable devices for cars, camping trips, and other summertime activities.19 The ability to be in public spaces and reach a faraway place fascinated early adopters. From the beginning, the design of mobile devices was conceived with particular public places in mind, namely, on vacation, in the car, and in nature. The technology may not have been reliable, but the brief portable craze of the 1920s provided a glimpse of Americans’ desire for mobile entertainment to enhance their experience of public spaces.

Transistor Radio Era

Portable radios became more technologically advanced in the 1930s and 1940s, as the components became smaller, but the devices did not become truly popular until the invention of the transistor in the early 1950s. Transistors replaced the bulkier and more energy-intensive Audion tubes, making portable radios inexpensive and long lasting. The end of the Second World War, the development of America’s automobile culture, and the beginnings of teen-focused marketing had a massive effect on mobile media. Portable radios provided people with a sense of independence and control over space, as it enabled people to fill their surroundings with music. The rise of the teen audience changed the music industry, as record labels began making rock ’n’ roll music that teens could conceal from their parents via personal headphones.20 Schiffer writes, “The shirt-pocket portable or, simply, the transistor (as it was called then) became a metaphor for freedom and independence; the right to express, in music and in things, the style and tastes of youth.”21 The popularity and utility of the transistor to youth audiences came as a surprise to manufacturers that originally thought these devices would be too expensive for young people and targeted adults instead.22 Teens’ desire for control and the ability to evade adult supervision guided the design of mobile devices. Not only did the needs of the audience dictate the direction of the technology, but the aesthetics of the music adjusted to be more conducive to headphones.23 Throughout the late 1950s, portable-radio makers such as Zenith directed their advertising to American teens by inserting the devices in teen hangouts like the soda shop.24 As American radio makers competed with Japanese companies, prices dropped, and portable radios became ubiquitous by the end of the 1960s.25

Transistor radios concealed music and allowed listeners to create a “soundscape” to accompany their movements through the world. The composer Murray Schafer initially described soundscapes as an urban-planning concept that can be deployed to institutionalize and organize public space.26 The mobile device allows the listener to make his or her own soundscape, potentially against institutional design. Mobile devices provide both a customizable and a clandestine audio experience while also giving listeners a sense of control over their surroundings. Shuhei Hosokawa has found that this customization and feeling of autonomy provided by portable radios only increased as mobile devices evolved from transistors to the cassette players of the 1980s.27 Hosokawa explains that the feeling of autonomy provided by mobile devices is most obviously observed in the way people move through public space. The listener’s soundscape can augment his or her bodily experience and can affect the listener’s gait and passage through space.28 Thus, listening to a mobile device provides the user with an enhanced reality and the power to choose a route through everyday life.

Portable TV Era

Portable television devices also provided a similar sense of control and autonomy over public space but with an added visual element. Spigel describes a 1967 Sony advertisement for portable television that compares mobile viewing to the romantic intimacy of the drive-in movie.29 The Sony ad offered this fantasy as a way of differentiating portable television from its more domesticated older sibling. The appeal and the target demographic are similar to the teen-oriented advertising of the transistor radio era. In both cases, the concept of the portable device as a transgressive technology is foregrounded. Spigel makes the point that the desire for mobility in television was often couched in gendered assumptions.30 A portable screen meant that people could personalize their viewing, since men and women did not have to watch the same show if they had an additional portable screen. Spigel explains that, contributing to the gender divide, within the rhetoric of the 1960s “New Frontier” political ethos, men were depicted as “sportsmen and adventure seekers.”31 Portable television, and most new media devices, target men as the early adopters, those users willing to test the limits of the technology. This gender split is one that Spigel sees continuing in later mobile technologies such as the home office and the mobile worker.32 During the 1960s, mobile technology continued to blur the distinctions between public and private through the depiction of gender distinctions that reinforced divisions between public and private spheres.

At the same time, portable television offered the family a way to bring their home with them on the road. Spigel describes the desire in the 1960s to bring the comfortable and family-unifying activities of television viewing on the road.33 In the 1950s, television addressed the suburban family by offering them a “window on the world,” which helped them stay connected to the nation from the comfort of the living room. The portable-television ads of the 1960s advocate leaving the home, enjoying nature, and bringing a piece of home with you. The rhetoric of portable television encouraged a more passive media experience for mobile devices than the one presented by portable radio devices. Mobile television suggested that, instead of using mobile devices to create a soundscape to enhance a public place, you could ignore your surroundings by making any place your living room. Both technologies shared an emphasis on using mobile devices as personal technologies that allowed you to transform your surroundings. Yet they differed in terms of the active versus passive engagement with public space. Listening to a portable radio, a person uses the soundscape as he or she travels through space, sometimes transgressing the restrictions of traffic laws. Watching a portable television, a person is in public space but retreats to a makeshift living room.

Car Phones and Pagers

Mobile phones continued the evolution of mobile devices that blurred distinctions between private and public space. Unlike portable radio or television, these devices facilitate communication between users. Early car phones and pagers offered a way for the outside world to intrude on the private sphere. Mobile phones have long been associated with work; early adopters were mainly taxi drivers, truckers, emergency services, and the military.34 Other personal mobile communication devices, such as pagers, were associated with particular professions, such as medicine, because these tools allowed busy multitaskers to receive messages without disturbing other daily activities.35 Bell and AT&T launched the first commercially available car-mounted telephones in 1978. Despite international appeal, there was a strong feeling in the US from engineers, marketers, and managers that these new phones were more viable in cars than as portable phones carried by people. This insistence on car phones over personal mobile devices reflects the cultural attitudes around this technology, the intended audience, the current technological capabilities, and the American preoccupation with automobile travel. Correspondingly, mobile phones became associated with “businessmen” extending their workday, transforming the time spent commuting into productive work time.36 The mobile phone shifted from being a trapping of the business elite to a status symbol of the wealthy in the late 1980s.37 Eventually this technology became the tool of many tradespeople traveling from client to client.38 The expense and limitations of car phones helped to shape their initial usage and cultural association with work. Unsurprisingly, the flexible labor associated with the mobile worker continued to influence the use and design of mobile devices.

Walkman Era

In the 1980s, a new technology surpassed the portable radio in popularity: the mobile cassette player. The most popular model of these was Sony’s Walkman. The cultural studies theorists Paul Du Gay, Stuart Hall, Linda Janes, Anders Koed Madsen, Hugh Mackay, and Keith Negus famously used the Sony Walkman to demonstrate the usefulness of applying the circuit of culture methodology to an analysis of a cultural product.39 Throughout Du Gay et al.’s analysis, there is documentation of Sony’s advertising campaigns for the technology. These ads emphasized youth, mobility, and originality; the Walkman represented the cutting-edge of miniaturization technology and 1980s personalization.40 Sony created numerous versions of the Walkman to attract consumers of various self-definitions.41 The concept of movement and outdoor use was consistent among all models. An attachable clip allowed a person to fasten the device to his or her waistband, allowing hands-free operation.42 A solar-powered version of the Walkman gave users the capability of using the device outside the home, away from power sources. The Walkman was a technology of the young and energetic. It was a way for this demographic to choose its own soundscape distinct from the one provided by previous generations. No longer were listeners limited by the reach of their radio tuner. The ability to select music (via audio cassettes) helped these youthful consumers realize this feeling of autonomy. The Walkman heightened the economic divide between people who could afford the technology and harness this control and those who could not. At the same time, these mobile devices ushered in new practices of creative expression such as the mix tape and the audio book.

Handheld Electronic Games

Portable game devices, modern descendants of Jiggle Puzzle BB games and other nonelectronic handheld games, built on the mobile media habits of portable television.43 Both portable electronic games and portable television demanded more of the user’s attention than the headphones of a portable music player did. The gaming devices, however, were more overtly active than television was, which was apparent in the design of the games and in their public use. Toy companies such as Mattel, Milton Bradley, and Coleco enjoyed success in the late 1970s and early 1980s with a line of handheld electronic video games that accounted for $1 billion in annual sales, one-fifth of all toy sales in the US.44 However, Nintendo’s Game Boy was the most successful and sophisticated of the portable game devices. Launched in 1989, the device succeeded largely due to the popularity of the game Tetris, a simple game of stacked cubes that the player must fit together as they descend from the top of the screen.45 Tetris’s popularity may derive from its simplicity; because it did not require much player instruction, it was easy to play while waiting in a public space.

Nintendo’s 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 waiting periods within the game. Chapter 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.