Mass platformization and video on demand have incentivized the development of new consumption habits, which clash with the evermore spatially and time-fragmented lifestyles, routines, and rituals. The use of these technologies is woven with multitasking as a way to combat everyday activities. In this paper, we discuss 'background viewing' as a microsocial practice of multitasking, which combines mundane everyday work activities with the viewing of TV content on streaming services, thus showing us the transformed relation between technology, content, and audiences. Through user experience, which I am monitoring with the help of an application, a browser extension for time monitoring viewership of streaming channels, and with the help of focus groups, I establish consideration about the newly developing practice of consuming content. The thesis connects the dimension of technology and user experience of media consumption – the nature of content and motivation of viewership through the terms of intimacy, routinization and ritualization, fragmentation of attention and the continuity of partialized attention and privatized mobility. Throughout this, I am trying to find an answer upon a key aspect: should 'background viewing' of content on streaming channels, amid work obligations, be considered viewing or simply glancing?
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