“For those If you want to feel even more relaxed on election night, I highly recommend elections.omg.lol.” That's Andrew Coutts, senior editor at WIRED talking about A single-serving site With a three-by-three grid of nine youtube The embed broadcasts live coverage of each 24-hour news channel. Election.OMG.LOL's nine portals provided a constant stream of red-and-blue maps, talking heads, and man-on-the-street reports about America's future. it was Vomiting,scary and little helpful,” and “a hell place.”
When I clicked on it this was one of four screens I was looking at.
Yes, on election night 2024, like many others, I had CNN on, a laptop open, and a phone in my hand. This is nothing new; Many people watch TV by keeping another device nearby. As the results started coming in it became clear how much of the space on each of those screens was devoted to a small, usage-specific screen.
Of course, CNN was full of headlines and tickers showing how many Electoral College votes Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris each had. There were also boxes giving countdown sounds for when the next elections would end. My iPhone had a revolving door of TikTok, X, and Instagram. (I saved a small piece of virtual estate by not turning it on dynamic island election results The service Apple unveiled this week.) My laptop, a combination of Chrome tabs open to news sites, and a Slack full of chats with coworkers — that's how I found that Verge post in the first place.
In fact, no one does picture-in-picture on their TV screens anymore, but TV has been supplemented with tablets, smartphones, laptops. Almost every screen available to us is now filled with other screens, fragmenting into oblivion.
Even in VRChat, where my colleague Boone Ashworth He spent most of his election eveThere were people watching screens… embedded in screens strapped to their faces.
There's nothing very Andy Rooney to be said about this, but perhaps that's too much. It's 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 freed up space on the screen for this purpose. Start taking it as if it has real value. This column is named Monitor because it is about what we look at, device agnostic, but it is also about what we pay attention to, what we see. Perhaps reducing the number of things one pays attention to provides a way to observe more.