Tracing Attentions Toward an Analysis of Simultaneous Media Use

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.