Engaging Distractions: Regulating Second-Screen Use in the Theater

Abstract

This article examines emerging industry discourses around multitasking and mobile phone use inside US movie theaters. By disciplining or encouraging certain second-screen practices, sectors of the American fi lm industry have developed contradictory strategies for governing spectators into proper forms of single- or multiscreen spectatorship. The article explores the historical appearance of these industry strategies, the competing modes of audience subjectivity they imagine, and the extent to which material audience practices correspond to them. In so doing, it also considers the tensions of regulating and conceptualizing audience attention, interactivity, and distraction in theatrical spaces.

Taming Distraction: The Second Screen Assemblage, Television and the Classroom

“…While in fact many cinemas (or concert halls and theatre venues) do ask the audience to switch off their mobile devices before the start of the show (Hassoun, 2016), the case of multiple-screen use here has become much more ambivalent (and therefore productive) in recent years. Movies, theatre shows, and particularly television have begun to harness rather than ban the second screen-both to safeguard attention and to augment the experience.…”

“…Other research has focused on the social circumstances of second screen use (Wilson, 2016), the spatial transformation of TV (Stauff, 2015), on the changing relationships between producers and audiences (Bennett, 2012), and on the second screen's potential to heighten a sense of citizenship (Selva, 2016). Dan Hassoun's rich work has shown how the second screen is policed in the cinema (Hassoun, 2016) and in the classroom (Hassoun, 2015) and how it relates to broader concerns of simultaneous media use (Hassoun, 2012(Hassoun, , 2014. Adding to this growing body of research I want to focus more on the conceptual and theoretical implications of the second screen.…”