88% of Americans Use a Second Screen While Watching TV. Why?
December 26th, 2019Via: Ars Technica:
According to data from Nielsen, the TV metrics company, 88 percent of Americans “use a second digital device while watching TV.” Seventy-one percent of Americans “look up content related to content they are watching,” while 41 percent of Americans are busy messaging “friends/family about content they are watching.”
Can this possibly be true? And can it be good for us?
…
In my darker moments, I suspect that mental clutter is the point of it all, as we seek to be “distracted from distraction by distraction.” We are “filled with fancies and empty of meaning” in order to keep ourselves from the terror of our own deeper thoughts, our own loneliness and boredom, our own existential despair. Those inner voices can terrify—so the lengths we go to blot them out are remarkable. “Not here,” we tell ourselves. “Not here the darkness, in this twittering world!”
