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

“For those of you who privation Election Night to consciousness adjacent much unhinged, I highly urge elections.omg.lol.” That's WIRED elder exertion Andrew Couts talking about a single-serving site with a three-by-three grid of 9 YouTube embeds, each broadcasting a 24-hour quality channel’s unrecorded coverage. Election.omg.lol’s 9 portals into the aboriginal of America provided a changeless watercourse of red-and-blue maps, talking heads, and man-on-the-street reports. It was nauseating, “horrifying and kinda helpful,” and “a hellhole site.”

It was besides 1 of 4 screens I was looking astatine the infinitesimal I clicked connected it.

Yes, connected predetermination nighttime 2024, similar truthful galore others, I had CNN on, a laptop open, and a telephone successful my hand. This is not new; tons of radical ticker TV with a 2nd instrumentality nearby. What became wide arsenic the results started pouring successful was however overmuch abstraction connected each of those screens was devoted to immoderate smaller, use-specific screen.

CNN, of course, had chyrons afloat of headlines and tickers showing however galore Electoral College votes Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris had. There were besides boxes blaring countdowns for erstwhile the adjacent polls would close. My iPhone contained a revolving doorway of TikTok, X, and Instagram. (I saved myself a tiny portion of virtual property by not turning connected the Dynamic Island predetermination results work Apple unveiled this week.) My laptop, a operation of Chrome tabs unfastened to quality sites and a Slack afloat of chats with coworkers—which is however I got served that Verge station successful the archetypal place.

No 1 does picture-in-picture connected their TV screens anymore, really, but TVs person been supplemented with tablets, smartphones, laptops. Nearly each surface disposable to us, is present afloat of different screens, bifurcating into oblivion.

Even successful VRChat, wherever my workfellow Boone Ashworth spent overmuch of his predetermination eve, determination were radical looking astatine screens … embedded into the screens strapped to their faces.

Not to beryllium each Andy Rooney astir it, but possibly that’s excessively much. Not that I privation to spell backmost to the days of conscionable watching 1 happening connected TV oregon speechmaking 1 book, absent different things to distract me, but possibly it’s clip we started treating the abstraction connected screens similar it holds existent value. This file is named The Monitor due to the fact that it’s astir the things we watch, instrumentality agnostic, but it’s besides astir what we wage attraction to, what we observe. Maybe reducing the fig of things 1 pays attraction to provides a mode to observe more.