No flipping

The Guardian recently reported on this paper by psychologists Katy Y.Y. Tam and Michael Inzlicht that claims that “switching behavior on digital media makes people more bored.”

Boredom is unpleasant, with people going to great lengths to avoid it. One way to escape boredom and increase stimulation is to consume digital media, for example watching short videos on YouTube or TikTok. One common way that people watch these videos is to switch between videos and fast-forward through them, a form of viewing we call digital switching. Here, we hypothesize that people consume media this way to avoid boredom, but this behavior paradoxically intensifies boredom.

So in other words, channel flipping and other kinds of distracted viewing don’t address boredom but express it. Scrolling and clicking is a way to tell yourself you are bored. (It seems strange that research would be necessary to establish this. Who thinks you can doomscroll your way to engagement?) Another implication of this claim is that having to exercise agency is something that we process as “boring.” From this perspective, too much choice causes boredom, and thus we should be more passive about what we engage with and just engage more intently with whatever is put in front of us.

But what does “boredom” even mean in this context? “Escaping boredom” and “increasing stimulation” are casually joined in that passage as if one naturally implies the other, and the paper then sets out to rebut that assumption. They stop short, however, from questioning whether boredom itself is a useful framework — whether admitting the possibility of boredom already consigns one to seeking out “stimulation” rather than other kinds of experience. What is named “boredom” is perhaps better described as an induced compulsion to consume.

One of the researchers told the Guardian that “boredom was closely linked to attention,” which doesn’t seem especially clarifying, like pointing out that hunger has something to do with eating. In the paper, the researchers cite a description of boredom as an “aversive state of wanting, but being unable, to engage in satisfying activity,” noting that “it often arises in situations that lack novelty.” That doesn’t seem to explain anything either. Can boredom even be measured, such that it can be intensified? Isn’t it that one is either bored or not, and there aren’t any degrees? Under what conditions is novelty preferred to familiarity? Is boringness a characteristic of certain content or is it a subjective disposition? What forces are at work to valorize novelty for its own sake, as if it had some definitive, positive relationship to “stimulation,” as if it couldn’t evoke disorientation or indifference? (Why do I find almost all new music “boring”?)

“Boredom” may not be a condition unto itself but an inadequate, evasive description of other emotional states — frustration, distraction, disappointment, inhibition, dissatisfaction — that works to protects them from being confronted directly. The paper argues that “avoiding boredom is not particularly effective in alleviating it,” but framing one’s problem as “boredom” may be the problem itself. “Being bored” is a desire to stay within its terms, to oscillate between attention and inattention. If you are simply “bored,” you don’t have to try anything more elaborate than “digital switching” to address the feeling, which then fails because it isn’t actually meant to resolve the condition. Boredom is a kind of procrastination, and flipping around is a mode of delay, allowing oneself to wallow in the bored feeling and avoid other ways of being that require more presence, attention, involvement. Boredom is chosen over harder states of feeling. It’s a manageable form of unpleasantness relative to whatever it is masking.

The Guardian piece frames the paper as debunking the intuition that “having the option to skip through a video or switch to another would make viewing a video less boring.” The researchers conclude that “people are getting increasingly bored these days, and our results suggest that the way people interact with digital media might play a role.” They suggest that “enjoyment likely comes from immersing oneself in the videos rather than swiping through them.” In flipping around, bored people are chasing a kind of quantity over quality, but why not neither? Perhaps it was too obvious to point out that enjoyment might entail not watching videos at all.

The researchers’ conclusion invites the idea that people who are bored just need more engaging content. As they tell the Guardian, “Just as we pay for an immersive experience in a movie theatre, enjoyment often comes from immersing ourselves in videos rather than swiping through them.” Maybe if the content algorithms were better and found more “immersive” content, we wouldn’t experience boredom.

But “the way people interact with digital media” is shaped by the algorithmic infrastructure, which configures attention in terms of “boredom” rather than focus. This infrastructure often prioritizes short videos and datafied responses over “immersion” as a way to keep users on a platform and make those users into assets. Algorithmic feeds make digital switching seem like the only kind of activity, the only way to intervene in a system intent on pacifying us — a system that muddles pacification with “immersion,” “engagement,” and “satisfaction.”

The distinction between quality and quantity can be mapped onto the psychoanalytic concepts of drive and desire — the “death drive” toward nullity vs. the “pleasure principle” that seeks rewarding objects. The drive corresponds with what Natasha Dow Schüll described as “the machine zone” in her book about machine gambling, Addiction by Design. In the machine zone, one no longer seeks the pleasure of winning but the compulsiveness of continuing to operate the machine, reducing life to a narrow series of repetitions — a perpetual “digital switching” inertia in which “contentment” or “satisfaction” are no longer relevant to the process of keeping stimuli moving.

Media consumption on devices that are always with us are optimized to induce the machine zone, at which point “boredom” ceases to be a relevant concept. The paper assumes that boredom is a problem of desire — the objects are inadequate for sustaining pleasure. But it may be that boredom signals that drive has pre-empted desire. Entering the machine zone is entering into terminal boredom. The pressure of endless media is not to achieve interest or engagement but to achieve a kind of liberating boredom — to reach an arbitrary stopping point at which one reclaims desire, in which one can feel disappointed again.