“THE NUMBER of people who are in a new size is pretty staggering,” Chip Bergh, the head of Levi Strauss, admitted in June. After more than a year of on-and-off lockdowns, the denim-maker told the Associated Press that a quarter of customers no longer fit in their jeans.
The long spell on the sofa may have been bad for the world’s waistlines, but it has been a golden era for the industries that provide in-home distractions. As entertainment options outside the home were shut down, and commuting gave way to home-working, people had time on their hands. Consumption of everything from books and podcasts to music and video games shot up (see chart).
Now, as vaccines begin to do their job, governments in many rich countries are starting to lift stay-at-home orders, and people are venturing back out. Offices are reopening, restaurants are taking orders and live audiences are back, everywhere from Cannes to Wimbledon. Our “normalcy index” shows that life in many of the 50 countries included is creeping back to business as usual.
As the amount of spare time at home starts to shrink, the attention boom of 2020 is giving way to what Mark Mulligan of MIDiA Research, a firm of analysts, dubs an “attention recession”. The squeeze on free time means that media companies are now all asking the same question, says Brendan Brady of Antenna, a company that measures video-streaming subscriptions: “Is this now a period of stability? Or are we going to fall off a cliff?”
The average full-time worker gained about 15% more spare time during the pandemic, according to a survey by MIDiA of consumers in America, Australia, Britain and Canada. Not only did they have more time, but those who kept their jobs had more money, too. Americans’ spending on recreation such as sports, theme parks and holidays, fell by 30% in 2020.
Instead, people turned to their screens. In Britain, the time people spent online last year (including television streaming services) rose by more than half an hour a day, to nearly five hours, according to Ofcom, a communications regulator. Being connected became essential. At the start of the pandemic one in ten British homes lacked internet access, but since then about half of those have gone online. Seeking new distractions, smartphone users around the world installed 143bn new apps, a quarter more than in 2019 (and more than double the previous year’s rate of growth), according to Craig Chapple of Sensor Tower, which monitors app stores.
The biggest share of the extra screen-time went to television: video-viewing rose by about 80 minutes a week in rich countries, finds MIDiA. Video-gaming saw the biggest proportional jump, as people devoted an extra hour per week, or 30% more time, to games. Listening to music edged up by 5%, while podcasts and audiobooks rose by nearly a quarter.
Books of the printed variety also got a boost. In Britain, four out of ten people reported that they were reading more than they used to, according to Nielsen, a data firm. The jump was most pronounced among young people, particularly women, who spent 50% more time reading than they did before the pandemic. Some of this was escapism, but much of the reading had a practical motive: cooking and gardening books were the top choices in non-fiction, while in children’s books, home-learning saw the biggest increase.
As spare time dries up, the question is which of these newly acquired habits will stick and which will be dropped. In the ultra-competitive video-streaming market, there are early signs that audiences may be cutting back. The average number of streaming services used by viewers in America is falling for the first time, according to Omdia, a research firm. In April the typical viewer used 7.06 services (including free ones), down from 7.23 in November. Worldwide, 5m people signed up to Netflix, the market leader, in the first quarter of the year, down from 15m in the same period in 2020. Disney+, a leading rival, also undershot analysts’ sign-up forecasts.
Yet the main losers in the attention recession, when it comes to viewing, will be old-school formats. Cable-viewing in America, long in decline, rose slightly during the depths of 2020’s lockdown. But reopening has set it sliding faster than ever: by 23% year on year in the second quarter of 2021, according to MoffettNathanson, a firm of analysts. Viewership of American broadcast television dropped by the same amount. And although most cinemas have reopened, the year-long disruption was enough to persuade film studios to change the way they do business. Some now release their new blockbusters on their streaming services on the same date that they make their cinema debut. The long “theatrical window”—the three months when a new film could only be seen on big screens—has been permanently cut short (see Business section).
As well as hastening the switch from old to new formats, covid-19 has shown how different sorts of media increasingly compete with each other for consumers’ attention. Until a decade ago, people accessed different media using different hardware: TV sets for video, computers for gaming, stereos for music. Today all varieties are delivered by smartphone.
People don’t have a specific slot in their schedule for video, says Emmett Shear, chief executive of Twitch, a live-streaming company. Instead, “People think about, ‘Where am I going to get entertainment?’… and they go to the service that is providing the most of that.” As lockdowns lift, he adds, Twitch’s main competitors will probably be basketball, frisbee and the park.
The competition between different types of media is clearest in audio. During the downtime of 2020 people listened to more of everything, from music to podcasts and audiobooks. But music’s share of overall listening time went down. At the start of the pandemic, podcasts and audiobooks accounted for a fifth of all listening. By the end of last year their share had risen to a quarter, says MIDiA. As listening time returns to pre-pandemic levels, some evidence suggests that people are sticking with these new choices, and cutting back on music to make way for them. Spotify said in April that podcasts had nibbled away at music to reach an all-time high in their share of customers’ total listening.
The rebalancing from music to podcasts suits streaming companies. Whereas they license most of their music from record companies, which own the rights to songs, they are increasingly commissioning podcasts of their own. This gives them both a way to differentiate themselves from their competitors—“Call Her Daddy” and “The Joe Rogan Experience” are exclusive to Spotify, for instance—and to increase their profit margins. Mr Mulligan notes that Amazon has an opportunity to differentiate its own audio offering by combining Amazon Music, its music- and podcast-streaming service, with Audible, its audiobook company.
The single biggest new media habit to be formed during the pandemic appears to be gaming. The extra hour per week that people spent gaming last year represented the largest percentage increase of any media category. And unlike other lockdown hobbies, it is showing no sign of falling away as life gets back to normal. It has become “a sticky habit”, says Craig Chapple of Sensor Tower. He finds that last year people installed 56.2bn gaming apps, a third more than in 2019 (and three times the rate of increase the previous year). The easing of lockdowns is not denting the habit: the first quarter of 2021 saw more installations than any quarter of 2020. Roblox, a sprawling platform on which people make and share their own basic games, reported that in the first quarter of this year players spent nearly 10bn hours on the platform, nearly twice as much time as they spent in the same period in 2020.
Gaming’s popularity rests most heavily on Generation Z—roughly, under-25s—who account for most of Roblox’s users. A poll in February by Deloitte, a consultancy, found that whereas all other generations of Americans named television and films as their favourite form of home entertainment, Generation Z ranked them last, after video games, music, web browsing and social media. In time, “the dominant position that video entertainment has held could be challenged,” Deloitte argues.
The changing shape of post-lockdown life can also be seen through social media. People spent an extra 40 minutes a week on social networks last year, as well as an extra half-hour consuming news, sometimes via social-media platforms. In April this year Facebook said that the increased levels of engagement it had seen in 2020 were subsiding as lockdowns eased.
Snapchat, on the other hand, reported the opposite. Evan Spiegel, chief executive of Snap, the app’s developer, told investors that as lockdowns lifted in America in late February, the amount of content posted on it increased. Since the end of March, he said, there had been a rise in the rate of new friendships, as people began to socialise more in real life. “There doesn’t seem to be much concern that social-media usage will meaningfully erode as economies open up,” notes Michael Nathanson of MoffettNathanson in an analyst’s note. “With people able to meet more in person, it may indeed increase.”
Perhaps the most obvious winner among social networks will be dating apps. Match Group, which owns several such outfits including Tinder, reported that new sign-ups fell last year in April, as covid-19 arrived, and again in December, amid the virus’s second wave. But now people seem to be making up for lost time. So far this year sign-ups are running about 10% higher than they were before the pandemic. In February nearly 20% more messages were sent than a year earlier. As people’s attention turns from the screen back to real life, Match has told investors to look forward to a “summer of love”. ■
Dig deeper
All our stories relating to the pandemic and the vaccines can be found on our coronavirus hub. You can also listen to The Jab, our podcast on the race between injections and infections, and find trackers showing the global roll-out of vaccines, excess deaths by country and the virus’s spread across Europe and America.
A version of this article was published online on June 27th 2021
This article appeared in the International section of the print edition under the headline “The attention recession”
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Sometimes, you just have to return to the classics.
That’s especially true as Halloween approaches. While you queue up your spooky movie marathon, here are 10 iconic horror movies from the past 70 years for inspiration, and what AP writers had to say about them when they were first released.
We resurrected excerpts from these reviews, edited for clarity, from the dead — did they stand the test of time?
“Rear Window” (1954)
“Rear Window” is a wonderful trick pulled off by Alfred Hitchcock. He breaks his hero’s leg, sets him up at an apartment window where he can observe, among other things, a murder across the court. The panorama of other people’s lives is laid out before you, as seen through the eyes of a Peeping Tom.
James Stewart, Grace Kelly, Thelma Ritter and others make it good fun.
— Bob Thomas
“Halloween” (1978)
At 19, Jamie Lee Curtis is starring in a creepy little thriller film called “Halloween.”
Until now, Jamie’s main achievement has been as a regular on the “Operation Petticoat” TV series. Jamie is much prouder of “Halloween,” though it is obviously an exploitation picture aimed at the thrill market.
The idea for “Halloween” sprang from independent producer-distributor Irwin Yablans, who wanted a terror-tale involving a babysitter. John Carpenter and Debra Hill fashioned a script about a madman who kills his sister, escapes from an asylum and returns to his hometown intending to murder his sister’s friends.
— Bob Thomas
“The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)
“The Silence of the Lambs” moves from one nail-biting sequence to another. Jonathan Demme spares the audience nothing, including closeups of skinned corpses. The squeamish had best stay home and watch “The Cosby Show.”
Ted Tally adapted the Thomas Harris novel with great skill, and Demme twists the suspense almost to the breaking point. The climactic confrontation between Clarice Starling and Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine) is carried a tad too far, though it is undeniably exciting with well-edited sequences.
Such a tale as “The Silence of the Lambs” requires accomplished actors to pull it off. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins are highly qualified. She provides steely intelligence, with enough vulnerability to sustain the suspense. He delivers a classic portrayal of pure, brilliant evil.
— Bob Thomas
“Scream” (1996)
In this smart, witty homage to the genre, students at a suburban California high school are being killed in the same gruesome fashion as the victims in the slasher films they know by heart.
If it sounds like the script of every other horror movie to come and go at the local movie theater, it’s not.
By turns terrifying and funny, “Scream” — written by newcomer David Williamson — is as taut as a thriller, intelligent without being self-congratulatory, and generous in its references to Wes Craven’s competitors in gore.
— Ned Kilkelly
“The Blair Witch Project” (1999)
Imaginative, intense and stunning are a few words that come to mind with “The Blair Witch Project.”
“Blair Witch” is the supposed footage found after three student filmmakers disappear in the woods of western Maryland while shooting a documentary about a legendary witch.
The filmmakers want us to believe the footage is real, the story is real, that three young people died and we are witnessing the final days of their lives. It isn’t. It’s all fiction.
But Eduardo Sanchez and Dan Myrick, who co-wrote and co-directed the film, take us to the edge of belief, squirming in our seats the whole way. It’s an ambitious and well-executed concept.
— Christy Lemire
“Saw” (2004)
The fright flick “Saw” is consistent, if nothing else.
This serial-killer tale is inanely plotted, badly written, poorly acted, coarsely directed, hideously photographed and clumsily edited, all these ingredients leading to a yawner of a surprise ending. To top it off, the music’s bad, too.
You could forgive all (well, not all, or even, fractionally, much) of the movie’s flaws if there were any chills or scares to this sordid little horror affair.
But “Saw” director James Wan and screenwriter Leigh Whannell, who developed the story together, have come up with nothing more than an exercise in unpleasantry and ugliness.
— David Germain
Germain gave “Saw” one star out of four.
“Paranormal Activity” (2009)
The no-budget ghost story “Paranormal Activity” arrives 10 years after “The Blair Witch Project,” and the two horror movies share more than a clever construct and shaky, handheld camerawork.
The entire film takes place at the couple’s cookie-cutter dwelling, its layout and furnishings indistinguishable from just about any other readymade home constructed in the past 20 years. Its ordinariness makes the eerie, nocturnal activities all the more terrifying, as does the anonymity of the actors adequately playing the leads.
The thinness of the premise is laid bare toward the end, but not enough to erase the horror of those silent, nighttime images seen through Micah’s bedroom camera. “Paranormal Activity” owns a raw, primal potency, proving again that, to the mind, suggestion has as much power as a sledgehammer to the skull.
— Glenn Whipp
Whipp gave “Paranormal Activity” three stars out of four.
“The Conjuring” (2013)
As sympathetic, methodical ghostbusters Lorraine and Ed Warren, Vera Farmiga and Patrick Wilson make the old-fashioned haunted-house horror film “The Conjuring” something more than your average fright fest.
“The Conjuring,” which boasts incredulously of being their most fearsome, previously unknown case, is built very in the ’70s-style mold of “Amityville” and, if one is kind, “The Exorcist.” The film opens with a majestic, foreboding title card that announces its aspirations to such a lineage.
But as effectively crafted as “The Conjuring” is, it’s lacking the raw, haunting power of the models it falls shy of. “The Exorcist” is a high standard, though; “The Conjuring” is an unusually sturdy piece of haunted-house genre filmmaking.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “The Conjuring” two and half stars out of four.
“Get Out” (2017)
Fifty years after Sidney Poitier upended the latent racial prejudices of his white date’s liberal family in “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” writer-director Jordan Peele has crafted a similar confrontation with altogether more combustible results in “Get Out.”
In Peele’s directorial debut, the former “Key and Peele” star has — as he often did on that satirical sketch series — turned inside out even supposedly progressive assumptions about race. But Peele has largely left comedy behind in a more chilling portrait of the racism that lurks beneath smiling white faces and defensive, paper-thin protestations like, “But I voted for Obama!” and “Isn’t Tiger Woods amazing?”
It’s long been a lamentable joke that in horror films — never the most inclusive of genres — the Black dude is always the first to go. In this way, “Get Out” is radical and refreshing in its perspective.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Get Out” three stars out of four.
“Hereditary” (2018)
In Ari Aster’s intensely nightmarish feature-film debut “Hereditary,” when Annie (Toni Collette), an artist and mother of two teenagers, sneaks out to a grief-support group following the death of her mother, she lies to her husband Steve (Gabriel Byrne) that she’s “going to the movies.”
A night out with “Hereditary” is many things, but you won’t confuse it for an evening of healing and therapy. It’s more like the opposite.
Aster’s film, relentlessly unsettling and pitilessly gripping, has carried with it an ominous air of danger and dread: a movie so horrifying and good that you have to see it, even if you shouldn’t want to, even if you might never sleep peacefully again.
The hype is mostly justified.
— Jake Coyle
Coyle gave “Hereditary” three stars out of four.
Read the full review here. ___
Researcher Rhonda Shafner contributed from New York.
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