“For those of For those who want to feel even more unhinged on election night, I highly recommend elections.omg.lol.” That’s WIRED senior editor Andrew Couts talking about a single service site featuring a three-by-three grid of nine YouTube embeds, each broadcasting live coverage from a 24-hour news channel. Election.omg.lol’s nine portals on America’s future provided a steady stream of red and blue maps, talking heads, and reports from people on the street. Was nauseating“horrible and a little useful” and “a hellish place.”
It was also one of the four screens I was looking at at the time I clicked on it.
Yes, on election night in 2024, like so many others, I had CNN on, a laptop open, and a phone in my hand. This is not new; Many people watch TV with a second device nearby. What became clear as the results began to come in was how much space on each of those screens was dedicated to a smaller, purpose-built screen.
CNN, of course, had chyrons full of headlines and tickers showing how many Electoral College votes Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris had. There were also boxes that loudly announced the countdown to know when the next polls would close. My iPhone contained a revolving door of TikTok, X, and Instagram. (I saved myself a small portion of virtual property by not turning on the Dynamic Island Election Results (service that Apple introduced this week). My laptop, a combination of Chrome tabs open to news sites, and a Slack full of chats with coworkers, which is how I got served by that Verge post in the first place.
No one really shows picture-in-picture on their television screens anymore, but televisions have been supplemented by tablets, smartphones, and laptops. Almost every screen available to us now is filled with other screens, branching off into oblivion.
Even on VRChat, where my colleague Boone Ashworth spent much of his election eve, there were people looking at screens… embedded in screens strapped to their faces.
I don’t want to be all Andy Rooney about it, but maybe it’s too much. It’s not that I want to go back to the days of just watching one thing on TV or reading a book, with no other things to distract me, but maybe it’s time we start treating screen space like it has value. real. This column is called The Monitor because it’s about the things we look at, regardless of the device, but it’s also about what we pay attention to, what we observe. Perhaps reducing the number of things one pays attention to provides a way to notice more.