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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 employee productivity tool.”1 The anxiety over digital distractions supports a cottage industry of digital management manuals designed to help employers and employees resist the temptation to click. An Amazon.com search for “productivity” returns reams of manuals and management guides that provide strategies for combatting this annoying “illness.”2 Stories about Internet use at work reflect larger concerns about the way mobile devices and Internet access in general steal time from more productive tasks. Despite these concerns, several studies have shown that “media snacking” can be restorative and actually increase productivity and creativity.3

Given research that shows that digital procrastination “may act as ‘digital watercooler’—enhancing workers’ productivity and effectiveness,” it is important to understand how these media snacks are made and for whom.4 Wired contributor Nancy Miller describes the concept of “snackable” media as the dominant mode of media engagement in the digital era: “Today, media snacking is a way of life. In the morning, we check news and tap out emails on our laptops. At work, we graze all day on videos and blogs. Back home, the giant HDTV is for 10-course feasting—say, an entire season of 24. In between are the morsels that fill those whenever minutes, as your mobile phone carrier calls them: a 30-second game on your Nintendo DS, a 60-second webisode on your cell, and a three-minute podcast on your MP3 player.”5 The relationship between “snacking” and “feasting” described by Miller also describes the hopes of media companies, that viewers will use their break times as appetizers—teasers for the “main course” of prime-time television or new film releases. Despite the designs of the procrastination economy, snacking can be more than just an amuse-bouche; it can be an indulgence and a rebellion as well. Digital content designed for the workplace is sustenance that helps certain people cope with the demands of their workday.

The workplace has always been an important location for social interaction; digital technologies make these activities more visible. Media studies scholars have encouraged a nuanced approach, producing research that considers social context as a contributing factor to cultural understanding. Much of this analysis takes social factors such as gender and class into account, although few scholars have examined specific sites such as the workplace.6 Digital content—whether in the form of movies, sporting events, social media feeds, television shows, websites, or games—provides a foundation for discussion around the virtual watercooler, break room, or lunch table. These discussions are part of the rhythms of the workday, bringing levity and camaraderie that help a place of employment feel like a community. In addition, media content can act as a common language for dealing with the local politics of the office or the larger politics of the nation.

In this chapter, I argue that the procrastination economy gives certain workers the ability to manage their workday with “media snacks.” Certain snacks correspond with the time of day or the work activity. The procrastination economy provides an endless variety of media snacks to ensure people can find the flavor, texture, and indulgence appropriate to their circumstances. Media companies support this workday media snacking in an effort to build programming flow, labor flow, and platform flow that can carry audiences and industry workers from one franchise, service, and product to another. While there are many types of media snacks available to the workplace audience, the media industries privileges those audience members who are most interested in checking in, catching up, and commenting on the latest headlines dominating cultural conversation. While audiences are free to use their mobile devices to spend their lunch breaks texting and catching up with loved ones, there is a consistent effort by media companies to entice the workplace audience to spend “snack time” with their intellectual property.

The Value of Snacking: Analysis of the Workplace Audience

Research on workplace procrastination shows that certain kinds of media snacks are more likely to support productivity than other kinds of media snacks.7 In addition, gender, relationship status, personality type, and workload contribute to the frequency and effects of media snacking.8 These studies demonstrate that snacking is related to a variety of contextual and social issues. Marshall McLuhan famously described media technology as “extensions of ourselves,” arguing, “the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”9 While McLuhan has been criticized for his tendency toward technological determinism, he aptly describes the way media technologies amplify “the scale and form of human association and action.”10 For example, workers already use media content in their work lives during break times and in conversation with coworkers. Mobile devices are tools for expanding this activity because they can include more participants and provide dynamic digital content that stimulates discussion. As digital technology and the ability to record usage of it proliferate, audience practices that were long ignored by entertainment companies begin to reveal themselves.

Mobile devices have enhanced media snacking at the workplace in two key ways: via mobility and choice. The fact that mobile devices are portable means that people can now do their media snacking in a variety of situations. This snacking is not limited to the break room but can happen at any time people need assistance from their mobile devices. Not only does this portability increase the utility of media snacking, but the access to a variety of content means that people can select the best snack for the occasion. Some situations call for audiocentric snacking, others require a short video, and sometimes people like to gather to watch a whole episode of a show. While mobile devices expand the possibilities for snacking, the use of mobile devices is still determined by routines. Multiple studies have shown that media snacking occurs within the flow of routines and becomes habitual, making it predictable and planned in relation to social factors.11 The types of media snacking relate to the social dynamics of the workplace and the routines of the workday. Mobile devices are a tool that enables workers to optimize their snacking for particular circumstances.

Evidence of the ways mobile devices enhance media snacking comes from ethnographic observations of three workplaces. From this analysis, it becomes clear that mobile devices are a crucial outlet for employees to stave off boredom, interact with colleagues, and assert their identities as informed consumers and citizens. Media-snacking practices can be categorized in three distinct periods: morning, lunch, and afternoon break times. Different technologies, digital platforms, and modes of viewing correspond to these snack breaks. Taken together, the way workers use their mobile devices demonstrates how workdays are built around a system of rewards and coping mechanisms that propel assignments toward completion, sustain connections between coworkers, and assuage the stresses of modern labor practices. The procrastination economy does not have to be a drag on the economy. Mobile devices help employees craft a more comfortable work environment. In this manner, workplace media habits are not much different from other workplace coping activities such as trading gossip around the watercooler. The procrastination economy is not a new threat to worker productivity but merely an enhanced version of snacking and coffee breaks that helps employees refocus and reward themselves for the completion of tasks.

Workers in monotonous jobs with repetitive tasks and low stakes in the success of the company are most likely to crave media snacks.12 This category of worker was readily available in the workplaces of two computer businesses in the Santa Barbara and Goleta area of central California and a large call center in New York City. The first company, Ameravant, is a website-production company that services businesses in the downtown Santa Barbara area of central California. Ameravant helps companies increase their online web presence and maximize their search-engine relevance. The entire company is composed of six programmers who all work in the same room at different desks with multiple computers running on each desk. Ameravant’s offices are located in the owner’s house, with each of the programmers organized in corners of the living room. The kitchen and living room are available to all employees, so meetings—both between coworkers and with clients—happen in the kitchen. The programmers work in the living room, and the owner’s office is in his bedroom. The atmosphere is relaxed but busy, since each programmer is responsible for maintaining multiple websites.

The second company, Latitude 34, is situated in a strip mall in downtown Goleta, California. Employees provide IT support for a variety of Santa Barbara companies. The company’s office has a more traditional office feel than Ameravant’s offices do. Latitude 34 is also family owned and employs seven workers. The office has an open floor plan with a variety of workstations used for computer maintenance. The employees arrive in the morning to contact customers and get a sense of the workload for the day. Most of the employees spend a great deal of time driving to client locations to repair computers. The moments when everyone is in the office are lively and full of conversation and collaboration.

The third workplace is the call center for a national distance-learning company.13 The offices feature multiple rows of cubicles with employees sitting at terminals dedicated to specific types of calls. This office is enormous and feels much less congenial than the other two smaller offices do. Despite the impersonal “cube farm” environment, there is a lot of collaboration between coworkers and a general atmosphere of enthusiasm. Compared to Ameravant’s and Latitude 34’s employees, the call center employees have less direct supervision (though their computers are monitored by a program) and are more responsible for their own workload. Workload is determined by the volume of calls and emails fielded by each division. The sales teams, whose job it is to send out calls, are by far the busiest employees; the online tech-support team is the most relaxed group, since their work does not involve having to respond instantly to a caller’s questions.

The Morning Routine

Employees at each of these offices began their workdays with an invigorating media snack that helped them prepare for the day. As soon as computers were operational, employees logged in to email, instant-messaging services, and Facebook, immersing themselves in that day’s workload and social world. To assist in the preparations for the day, employees in each of the locations set up personal mobile devices (tablets, laptop computers, and mobile phones) to act as second screens. One employee described his second screen as his “distraction computer,” which he used to separate his personal media from his work screen. The term “distraction computer” suggests that he sees his personal media as detrimental to his productivity, and so he segregates his media snacks from his primary work screen in order to keep them from drawing his attention from his work. The media snacks on these mobile devices primarily featured audio content including music, podcasts, and talk radio. The sound from these audio snacks blocked out office noise and helped employees focus on their individual tasks. Rather than causing work distraction, mobile audio devices actually gave workers tools to manage existing distractions through customizable offerings.

The use of sound to manage distraction has been a popular practice in work environments long before the advent of mobile devices. Streaming audio services can be considered modern incarnations of field songs sung by agricultural workers or radio broadcasts piped into factories by business owners in the 1940s.14 Employers have long believed that music improves workers’ productivity by creating a soundtrack that fades into the background and becomes a kind of white noise, masking the sounds of other activities.15 Silence is nearly impossible to attain in the workplace, so the radio, and now mobile devices, offers a controllable and consistent source of noise that assists employees’ focus on the completion of their work. Studies have found that employees who listen to music during repetitive tasks or during work preparation show increased productivity.16 Employees in all the workplaces I visited certainly believed that music enjoyed via a personal mobile device helped them prepare for their workday. Furthermore, they appreciated the ability and freedom to self-manage their focus by creating a comfortable white noise.

The music industry has carved a niche for itself in the procrastination economy through the development of user-friendly, customizable digital platforms. The subscription-based music service Spotify offers a variety of focus-boosting playlists for the workplace featuring music that fades into the background and blocks distracting noises. Spotify users can also create their own playlists, which workers frequently label with names that evoke a specific workplace context. For example, Spotify features playlists called “Workday Pop,” “Workday Lounge,” “Workday Soul,” “Your Coffee Break,” “The Office Mix,” “The Office Stereo,” “Jazzy at Work,” and “Rock at Work.” The playlists of Spotify users Sarah-Louise Thexton, who has a playlist called “Safe for Work (Pop),” ihascube, who has a playlist called “Work Music (Clean),” and Lisa Roach, who has a list called “Work Playlist,” as well as hundreds like them, reflect the workers’ understanding that there is particular music that is appropriate for the workplace.17 Spotify and its users make playlists for the rhythms of the workplace and censor their music tastes to be appropriate for public listening.

The ability to manage distractions is especially important in shared workspaces, where, at any given time, multiple workers may be talking on the phone with clients or discussing work with colleagues. The call center, with its rows of people talking on the phone, was a prime example of digital content being used to manage distraction: employees switched from phone headsets, used during phone calls, to headphones, used while working out problems on their computers. In the small offices of Ameravant, the customer service manager often met with clients in a room adjoining the computer programmers’ workspace. Much to the programmers’ chagrin, the door that separated the two rooms was frequently left open. Even after sitting in the office for only a few days, the customer-service pitch quickly became repetitive. The employees used their mobile devices to combat this distraction. Some workers sought refuge in their iTunes library; others listened to streaming music services and podcasts. These technologies are similar to personal radios because they allow employees to select a particular genre of music, an album, or a playlist. Employees can further customize their “white noise” by choosing forms of audio beyond music. For example, one of the employees toggled between NPR podcasts, previously viewed episodes of favorite television shows, and movies. He explained that accessing a variety of media was essential to his productivity.

Often the employee’s choice of digital content depended on whether he or she was using headphones or listening through speakers. Michael Bull has written about his concern over the use of headphones and portable media devices, claiming that these devices put people in their own “private bubble” and cut them off from their surroundings, as “sound enables users to manage and orchestrate their spaces of habituation in a manner that conforms to their desires. The sound of the personal stereo is direct, with headphones placed directly over the ears of the user, thereby overlaying the random sounds of the environment passed through with privatized sounds.”18 One employee remarked that his choice of music depends on who is in the room. When a fellow programmer with a shared sensibility is working near him, he puts on a song they both enjoy, and this provides a consistent background beat. If there are not multiple people in the office to share the music, he is more likely to put on his headphones and listen to a podcast related to his interests. In this instance, the ability to customize and stream music through digital services encourages a connection between coworkers; when working solo, the programmer uses sound to alleviate his isolation.

The ability to personalize a workday soundtrack is one of the ways mobile devices have enhanced everyday office practices. Before the Internet, the options for “white noise” were limited to media that were playable on a personal stereo. Smartphones and other mobile devices enable catalogs of content to travel with an employee into the workplace. Barbara Klinger, drawing on the work of Roger Silverstone, has argued that the proliferation of home entertainment products has expanded the role of media texts within our daily lives.19 Though she mainly focuses on home viewing, she describes repeat viewing of media texts as part of an intense process of personalization in which a text can help “confirm individual identity.”20 The workplace is another venue where people are actively engaged in this identity exploration, and digital content’s inherent portability and customizability supports that practice.21 A favorite film or television show may contain dialog or a soundtrack that is reaffirming to an employee, but, being sufficiently familiar, it does not distract from work-related tasks. These media snacks become a form of audio pleasure that serve multiple purposes: they provide pleasant background noise, allow employees to assert control over their workday, and give employees a way to express their identities through their media consumption choices.

Lunch

Musical media snacks help concentration and motivate employees to start the day, but by lunchtime, employees are hungry for more relaxing and communal media snacks. Mobile devices offer mobility and community that surpasses the offerings of traditional break rooms and the limitations of modern labor schedules. Employees within the service industry do not leave for lunch together because someone is required to stay and answer phones or continue working. (The Latitude 34 offices were an exception 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 by using their mobile devices to give themselves a media-snacking reward system.

Yvonne Jewkes’s research on prison inmates shows that when media access is used as a reward, it helps to normalize the rules and regulations of the institution.35 As with any incentive system, the group that controls the object of desire, such as access to media content, can require certain behaviors from the people who want the object. The research on prisoners also shows that media content is essential to a person’s perception of him- or herself. Jewkes argues that within strict institutions, media content provides people with essential tools to reclaim their identities, mark time, and generally survive day-to-day stresses. Hopefully, most work environments are not as damaging to personal agency as prison is, although the restriction of media content in some workplaces may be similar. Unlike in prison, mobile-device viewing in the workplace, during break times, can be a negotiation between employee and employer. The employee agrees to abide by the structures of professionalism in exchange for some measure of freedom to engage in media consumption and, therefore, personal expression during his or her managed break times.

Break times are self-selected or scheduled moments during the day when employees are permitted to divert their minds from work to topics of their own interest. Despite the lack of federally mandated break times, several state governments and various unions have successfully instituted compensated break times for workers. These regulating bodies have argued that break times perform an important stress-relieving function.36 Researchers at the University of Melbourne demonstrated that employees who spent break time online were more productive than were employees who spent their break offline.37 Study coauthor Brent Coker explains that “short and unobtrusive breaks, such as a quick surf of the Internet, enables the mind to rest itself, leading to a higher total net concentration for a day’s work, and as a result, increased productivity.”38 Another study by researchers at the University of Singapore compared media snacking to a “coffee or snack break,” as it provided pleasure and rejuvenation to employees.39 These findings show that media snacking is as restorative as other break time activities are.

Much like lunchtime media snacking, employees in the three companies were strategic in their planning of their media snack breaks. One employee would check to see what his favorite online personalities had scheduled during the day and would plan his break times accordingly. He used Twitter, for example, to see if a comedian would be hosting a live chat or to see if a new episode of a favorite web series would be posted. If there was no time-sensitive digital content, break times were filled with casual web surfing in short breaks throughout the day. Employees at the call center often returned to social media sites throughout the day, sometimes as frequently as every 20 minutes, to see if any new updates had been posted. These employees claimed that their total visits to these sites spread throughout the day totaled the 15–20 minutes they were allowed for daily break time. By spacing out the media snacking at regular intervals, the employees gave themselves a number of rewards throughout the day. As one employee explained, “You can’t keep constantly working, nonstop, on work like this. You gotta take breaks.”40 The association between the type of work, in this case computer coding, and the need for media snacking has appeared in additional research on workplace Internet use.41 The repetitiveness and monotony of certain types of modern work make employees look for media snacks as a reward for completing tasks.

Break times are not just for personal restoration; they are also opportunities to socialize with coworkers. The symbol of workplace socializing is the watercooler, a place to discuss the previous weekend’s happenings and gossip about office politics. The association between watercoolers and workplace socializing is so strong that HBO created an entire advertising campaign with the premise that its shows were watercooler worthy.42 The campaign reflected the way coworkers discuss a previous night’s television programs. Digital technology has enhanced watercooler media discussions by providing tools for facilitating conversation. Before on-demand viewing and mobile devices, watercooler conversation depended on all participants having watched a particular program on a particular night; nowadays, when someone misses a memorable moment in a show, he or she can access it via digital resources. If television plays a central role as society’s common language, as television scholars have argued, digital media take things a step further by providing an easy way for fans to reminisce about a favorite movie or show, research a rumor, or create new fans by converting the uninitiated around a mobile device.43 Because digital content is more easily accessible than broadcast content is, nearly everyone in the office can participate in the watercooler conversation. In this way, the conversation becomes more inclusive, more diverse, and richer as a result.

The desire to discuss common interests during break time was broadly evident during my workplace visits. A colleague-to-colleague conversation about a video game or a YouTube video would often be overheard by other coworkers and would suddenly grow into several employees gathered together around a mobile device, where they would watch (or rewatch) the media object en masse. A prime example of this phenomenon occurred in the Latitude 34 offices. One day during observation, several of the employees decided to incorporate movie and television dialog into their regular conversations. At one point during a conversation involving lines from South Park, the employees repeatedly described the work they were collaborating on as “super cereal.” (This phrase is a reference to the South Park episode “ManBearPig.”) One of the employees was not familiar with that episode, so another employee described the episode and then frantically searched the web for a clip in which the characters used the joke phrase.

Not only is this kind of media snacking restorative, but like a break at the office watercooler, it offers an opportunity for socializing and reinforcing relationships. Cultural references are a way of distinguishing between groups of insiders and outsiders. John Fiske has written about the way slang terms and cultural references operate as a form of cultural capital that separates those who belong from those who do not.44 As seen in the preceding example, mobile devices help bridge these boundaries. Instead of excluding people who may be unfamiliar with a text, web-based content expands inclusivity by providing quick access to information about the references people use. By uniting people in this way, media snacking has proven to be an important tool in the development of fan networks. As Manuel Castells has noted, digital technology allows groups at work with shared interests to gather around the cultural events they find meaningful and not the ones that broadcast networks dictate.45 This community building culminates in such activities as workplace fantasy-sports leagues, group viewing parties, and the circulation of viral videos.

The media snacking observed throughout the offices I visited was notable for the ways it enhanced preexisting procrastination such as coffee breaks, lunch breaks, and snack breaks. Evidence of this media snacking reflected many of the results of larger studies conducted in the field of organization and management studies that show media snacking, in moderation, has restorative capabilities. In addition, this snacking fits within rhythms of the workday. Mobile devices enable on-demand access to digital content, which enables employees to take control of their media snacking and fit preferred types of media snacks to the appropriate types of day. Mobile devices allow employees to customize their snacking and enhance the benefits of restorative break times by providing access to the snacks they enjoy most. The versatility of mobile devices also enables employees to manage their own media snacking in relation to the specific content offerings on the web on a given day. Media companies contribute to the schedule of media snacking, as they target the procrastination economy with a variety of media snacks.

“Lunchtime Is the New Prime Time”: The Procrastination Economy at Work

Media companies are just as strategic creating media snacks as employees are in assigning them to particular parts of the workday. The history of web production reveals that the creation of media snacks is heavily influenced by the established media industries. Aymar Jean Christian explains that the financial realities of web production only allow “testing the medium from its margins.”46 The lack of sizable revenue in the procrastination economy means that the media snacks designed for the workplace are also designed to support and promote established media industries such as film and television productions. Media companies produce and distribute media snacks as appetizers meant to entice the workplace audience to integrate their intellectual property into their everyday routines and conversations. Media snacks provide brand maintenance and labor training through cross-platform flow, programming flow, and labor flow from mobile devices to film and television properties.

Fox Sports’ Lunch with Benefits programming schedule provides an example of this production strategy for the procrastination economy. Lunch with Benefits featured a collection of web series produced for the workplace audience that were designed to engage sports fans on the Monday after a busy sports weekend and encourage them to check in with Fox Sports properties as they prepared for the next weekend’s games. Each day of the week featured a new episode of a web series. Each web series was a different genre and style, covering the spectrum from interview talk shows to scripted workplace comedy to comedy clip show to sports strategy show. Each day at noon, the web series of the day would be featured on the MSN.com landing page and on the various Fox Sports apps. Monday’s The After Party with Jay Glazer and Tuesday’s Coach Speak with Brian Billick were both shows dedicated to providing wrap-up and analysis of the previous weekend’s football games. The College Experiment and Cubed aired on Wednesday and Thursday to provide humorous commentary about the sports world. Friday’s The Inside Call previewed upcoming games and featured the hosts of Fox’s NFL Sunday TV show preparing for the weekend’s broadcast. Each webisode lasted about half an hour and had its own sponsor.

Lunch with Benefits ended production after a three-year run, beginning with heavy promotion in 2009 and ending as a featured section of the Fox Sports app that launched in 2012. Though the series did not last long, the programming logic and labor practices associated with it are often replicated by digital departments across the media industries. The enthusiastic launch of Lunch with Benefits and the effort to connect traditional production practices and digital distribution are emblematic of a pervasive desire that shapes the culture of the procrastination economy.

The Fox Sports press release launching Lunch with Benefits positioned it as the flagship creation of the newly created Fox Sports Digital Entertainment division. The new unit was charged with making “lunchtime the new primetime” by offering the workplace audience a weekday web series programming block.47 The announcement’s use of the term “primetime” is indicative of how Fox Sports understood digital content and the importance of establishing a digital day part. This terminology and strategy connected the procrastination economy with traditional television production. The story of Fox Sports Digital Entertainment is emblematic of many efforts to create content for the procrastination economy. Specifically targeting the workplace audience, the network reused processes and insight gained from years creating television programming in its effort to provide snackable content that could elevate the conglomerate’s brands and franchises.