Forget Screen Time. We Need to Talk About Screen Real Estate

November 8, 2024:

“For those of you who want Election Night to feel even more unhinged, I highly recommend elections.omg.lol.” That’s WIRED senior editor Andrew Couts talking about a single-serving site with a three-by-three grid of nine YouTube embeds, each broadcasting a 24-hour news channel’s live coverage. Election.omg.lol’s nine portals into the future of America provided a constant stream of red-and-blue maps, talking heads, and man-on-the-street reports. It was nauseating, “horrifying and kinda helpful,” and “a hell site.”

It was also one of four screens I was looking at the moment I clicked on it.

Yes, on election night 2024, like so many others, I had CNN on, a laptop open, and a phone in my hand. This is not new; lots of people watch TV with a second device nearby. What became clear as the results started pouring in was how much space on each of those screens was devoted to some smaller, use-specific screen.

CNN, of course, had chyrons full of headlines and tickers showing how many Electoral College votes Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris had. There were also boxes blaring countdowns for when the next polls would close. My iPhone contained a revolving door of TikTok, X, and Instagram. (I saved myself a small piece of virtual estate by not turning on the Dynamic Island election results service Apple unveiled this week.) My laptop, a combination of Chrome tabs open to news sites and a Slack full of chats with coworkers—which is how I got served that Verge post in the first place.

No one does picture-in-picture on their TV screens anymore, really, but TVs have been supplemented with tablets, smartphones, laptops. Nearly every screen available to us, is now full of other screens, bifurcating into oblivion.

Even in VRChat, where my colleague Boone Ashworth spent much of his election eve, there were people looking at screens … embedded into the screens strapped to their faces.

Not to be all Andy Rooney about it, but maybe that’s too much. Not that I want to go back to the days of just watching one thing on TV or reading one book, absent other things to distract me, but perhaps it’s time we started treating the space on screens like it holds actual value. This column is named The Monitor because it’s about the things we watch, device agnostic, but it’s also about what we pay attention to, what we observe. Maybe reducing the number of things one pays attention to provides a way to observe more.

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