Saturday afternoon. Forest are playing. The television is on. And so is my phone. Twitter is open in one hand, the remote is in the other, and my eyes are moving between the two screens in a rhythm so practised it feels natural. Goal kick - check the timeline. Corner - watch the screen. Whistle - read the takes. This isn't distraction. This is how I watch football now. This is how most of us watch everything now. And it has changed the way culture works in ways we're only beginning to understand.
We never just watch anything anymore. We watch and comment. We watch and check. We watch and discuss. We watch and rate. The single-screen experience - the one where you sat in front of one thing and gave it your complete, undivided attention - is effectively dead for most people in most contexts. It has been replaced by the second screen, that phone in your hand that has become as much a part of the viewing experience as the content itself.
This isn't a complaint. I'm not about to lecture anyone about attention spans or the good old days. The second screen has created some of the richest cultural moments of the past decade. But it has also fundamentally changed what it means to consume culture, and if you're building products or creating content or thinking about brands, you need to understand what that change means.
The football timeline
Football is the clearest example of second screen culture because football was arguably the first medium to be fully transformed by it. The experience of watching a match in 2024 bears almost no resemblance to watching a match in 2004. Twenty years ago, you watched the game. You shouted at the television. You discussed it at work on Monday. The cultural processing happened slowly, over days, through conversations and newspaper columns and phone-in radio shows.
Now the cultural processing happens in real time. A goal goes in and within seconds - literally seconds - there are replays from twelve angles, tactical analysis, memes, hot takes, and arguments all unfolding on your phone while the players are still celebrating. The timeline is the pub. The timeline is the phone-in show. The timeline is the Monday morning debrief. It's all of those things simultaneously and instantly, and the experience of being part of that real-time conversation has become as much a part of watching football as watching the actual football.
I know this because on the rare occasions I watch a match without my phone - a deliberate act that feels almost transgressive now - the experience feels incomplete. Not worse, necessarily. But thinner. Like watching a film with the sound off. The second screen has become the soundtrack. The commentary layer that makes the primary experience richer, more social, more engaging. Taking it away doesn't return you to some purer state of watching. It just makes you feel disconnected.
Letterboxd and the review economy
Films have been transformed in a different but equally profound way. Letterboxd has turned film-watching into a social and curatorial act. You don't just watch a film anymore. You log it. You rate it. You write a review. You check what your friends thought. You look at what the wider community said. The film itself is still the primary experience, but Letterboxd has created a secondary experience around it that for many people - myself included - has become inseparable from the act of watching.
Think about what this means. The cultural value of watching a film has been expanded beyond the film itself. It now includes the anticipation (checking reviews before watching), the companion experience (reading hot takes during the credits), and the aftermath (writing your own review, comparing ratings, discovering what you missed). The film is ninety minutes. The cultural experience of the film is hours. And most of that extended experience happens on the second screen.
This isn't diminishing the art. I would argue it is enriching it. The fact that I watched a film and then spent thirty minutes reading other people's interpretations and writing my own means I engaged with that piece of art more deeply than I would have in the pre-second-screen era, when I would have watched it, thought "that was good," and moved on. The second screen, in this context, isn't a distraction from the art. It's an amplifier for it.
Cooking with YouTube
It isn't just entertainment. The second screen has infiltrated every domestic activity. We cook with YouTube tutorials playing on the counter. We exercise with Instagram workouts on the floor next to us. We clean the house with podcasts in our ears and a phone tracking our to-do list. We've created a world where almost no activity is a single-focus activity anymore. Everything has a companion screen. Everything has a layer.
This has created a new category of content: companion content. Content that isn't designed to be the main event but to accompany another activity. Podcasts understood this early - they're the perfect second-screen medium because they occupy your ears while your eyes are free. But visual content is catching up. The rise of ambient television - shows you can have on in the background without needing to follow every plot point - is a direct response to second screen culture. These shows aren't bad television. They're companion television. They're designed for partial attention because that's how people actually consume them.
What this means for products
If you're building a product in 2024, you need to decide which screen you're. Are you the first screen - the primary experience that commands the most attention? Or are you the second screen - the companion experience that enriches something else? Both are valid positions. But you can't be both, and you can't pretend you're the first when you're actually the second.
This is what CultureTerminal was built for, even if I didn't articulate it this way at the time. It's a second-screen product. It's designed to be checked, scanned, dipped into - not to command undivided attention for an hour. The design reflects this. Quick-scan headlines. Clean layout. No infinite scroll that tries to trap you. It respects the fact that it's probably not the only thing you're looking at right now, and it's designed to deliver value in the gaps between other activities.
Curio works the same way. It surfaces what your network is sharing so you can quickly see what matters without leaving whatever else you're doing. It's a glanceable product. A product that fits into the second-screen slot without demanding to be the first screen. And that deliberate modesty - that awareness of its own place in the attention ecosystem - is what makes it useful rather than annoying.
The attention honesty
Here's the uncomfortable truth that most product builders and content creators refuse to accept: you don't have anyone's full attention. You never have their full attention. Even when they're looking directly at your product, your website, your content, their phone is within arm's reach. Their mind is partially elsewhere. Their attention is fragmented by default and focused by exception.
This isn't a moral failing. It isn't a generational problem. It isn't something that needs to be fixed. It's simply the reality of how humans interact with media in an era of ubiquitous screens. And the products that succeed - the ones that people actually use and love and return to - are the ones that are honest about this reality rather than pretending it doesn't exist.
The worst products are the ones that demand your full attention and punish you for looking away. The pop-up that requires a response. The app that sends notifications if you've not engaged for twelve hours. The website that plays an autoplay video the moment you switch tabs. All of these are products that refuse to accept second screen culture. They're screaming "look at me, only me, right now" into a world where nobody looks at only one thing anymore. And the user experience isn't attention - it is resentment.
The best products are the ones that make peace with partial attention. They deliver value quickly. They save your place when you leave. They don't punish absence. They're there when you want them and invisible when you don't. They understand that they're part of an ecosystem of screens and they design for that ecosystem rather than pretending they exist in isolation.
The one exception
There's one context where the second screen still disappears: the cinema. When the lights go down and the screen fills your vision and the sound fills the room, something shifts. The phone goes in the pocket - or at least it should - and for two hours you give something your complete attention. The cinema is the last holdout of single-screen culture, and I think that's part of why people still love it. Not just for the bigger screen or the better sound. For the permission to focus. For the rare and increasingly precious experience of doing one thing at a time.
That rarity is itself a product of second screen culture. Single-focus attention has become so unusual that the places where it still happens - the cinema, the live concert, the theatre - feel almost sacred. They aren't competing with the second screen. They're offering an escape from it. And people will pay a premium for that escape precisely because it's so rare in their daily lives.
For everything else - the football, the films at home, the cooking, the commute, the evening on the sofa - the second screen is permanent. It isn't going away. It isn't a phase. It's how culture is consumed now, and the sooner we design for it honestly, the better everything will work. Watch, scroll, react. That is the rhythm. Build for the rhythm, not against it.
