Abstract

This article examines emerging industry discourses around multitasking and mobile phone use inside US movie theaters. By disciplining or encouraging certain second-screen practices, sectors of the American fi lm industry have developed contradictory strategies for governing spectators into proper forms of single- or multiscreen spectatorship. The article explores the historical appearance of these industry strategies, the competing modes of audience subjectivity they imagine, and the extent to which material audience practices correspond to them. In so doing, it also considers the tensions of regulating and conceptualizing audience attention, interactivity, and distraction in theatrical spaces.

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