Media multitasking has become a contested practice in many college classrooms. Students increasingly split their attentions between lecture and personal media, while educators largely view the new screens as fostering disengaged and distracted forms of conduct. Together, teachers and students have developed a series of strategies governing the proper practice of multitasking during lecture. Using interviews and ethnographic field observations, I examine how these strategies of media use operate within one undergraduate classroom. Drawing from this case study, I argue that multitasking reveals a complex series of negotiations between teachers, students, and their co-present environment. Examining these negotiations provides not only a snapshot of how media attention is practiced within the classroom but also suggests ways for instructors to respond to the rise of new technologies within their own classes.

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Simultaneous media use has become a prominent part of the contemporary media landscape. While critical media scholars continue to presume that audiences engage media one at a time, industries and advertisers are increasingly examining how viewers split their attentions across multiple screens at once, and how best to integrate these screens into synergized content streams. This article relates industry discourses on simultaneous media to longer-standing interest in audience inattention, specifically the ways that producers are reconceptualizing multitasking from a distracting activity to a potentially interactive one. Examining these discourses provides a foundation from which critical scholars can engage with the multiscreen contexts in which audiences use new media, while critiquing the presumptions of interactivity at the heart of convergence culture.