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This study draws from a series of qualitative interviews and take-home diaries conducted with groups of home film and television audiences to examine everyday practices of media attention and distraction. Often taken as clear and separate experiential states, attentiveness and distractedness are actually social categories with leaky boundaries and definitions. Together, they suggest logics from which audiences draw when they justify combining or not combining movies and television with other aspects of their daily routines (including mobile phone use, cooking, sleeping, working, and so on). Interviewing groups of cinephiles, television binge- watchers, and parents of small children, I detail how people try to attend and not attend to aspects of media texts in order to see themselves as “attentive” or “distracted” in particular contexts. I argue that these practices reveal some of the boundary work of everyday life itself— as a domain of accidents and unpredictability, as a sense of certainty and stability, as a series of managed time and work/leisure boundaries, and as a site for suspicion toward media influences. Within cinema and media studies, arguments about screen attention and distraction have been central to claims about medium specificity, genre and textuality, fandom, screen influence, and the organization of home life. By focusing on everyday knowledges about media engagement, my study both augments and complicates these assumptions about what it means to “watch” a media text, reflecting the (at once) anxiety, pleasure, impulsiveness, and indifference in how people may treat watching as a part of life to manage or cultivate. Ultimately, attending to issues of attention suggests the ongoing interrelationships involved in negotiating screenic versus non-screenic areas of life. |
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