Second-screen subsumption: Aesthetics of control and the second-screen facilitation of hyper-attentive watching-labour

Abstract

The article at hand theorizes the political economic shift between the aesthetic strategies deployed by network television in the broadcast-era and those deployed in the matrix-era. It argues that where in the former era certain strategies allowed for the disciplining of viewers’ sensory dimensions and in turn allowed for the ‘factory’ process of watching-labour to penetrate the private lives of people, in the latter era this factory process has not only collapsed into the home but also into viewers’ sensoria. And, that this is due to the nature of the control mechanisms embedded in the new aesthetic strategies deployed by media-capital through second-screen technologies. This article concludes by theorizing said set of mechanisms as an iteration of a society-wide aesthetic of control essential to the operation of contemporary capitalism.