The R-Tune Button

My brother and I watch television together, mostly half-hour episodes. The hour-long ones are harder. Somewhere in the back half a phone comes out, his or mine, and neither of us decided to reach for it.

Choosing a film has turned into a negotiation. We both have to genuinely want the thing, or one of us finds a way to put it off. Nobody says two hours is a lot to ask of me this evening. It comes out as maybe not tonight.

What bothers me is feeling the pull toward the phone and having to hold it down. I catch my brother fiddling with his and recognise the urge precisely, because mine is running at the same time and I'm sitting on it. Before all the social media machinery arrived I sat through films of two and three hours and had nothing to suppress. The compulsion wasn't there to manage, so managing it never came up. I miss being able to watch without that extra effort.

I wanted to understand what changed, starting with the choices available from the sofa.

Start with a button. There's one on nearly every remote control ever made, and it does exactly one thing: takes you back to whatever channel you were on before this one. Panasonic called theirs R-Tune. Other companies went with Jump, or Flashback, or Prev Ch. Same button, different word on the rubber. It made leaving a programme almost effortless, and just as easy to return if the other channel was no better.

The earlier remotes were less convenient. Zenith's first television remote, in 1950, was called Lazy Bones, and it had a wire. The cable ran across the living room floor and generated enough complaints about people tripping over it to make the corporate history (Zenith Electronics, 2026). The wireless one that followed in 1955 was a flashlight. You aimed it at photocells in the four corners of the cabinet, and it couldn't tell its own beam from the sun, so on bright afternoons the channels changed by themselves (Zenith Electronics, 2026).

Zenith's 1956 design used ultrasound. No battery at all: four spring-loaded hammers striking four aluminium rods, with an ultrasonic tone doing the work (Adler (Zenith Radio Corporation), 1957). You could hear the mechanism go off when you pressed it. That's why a generation called the remote the clicker, and the name stuck for decades after the last hammer was gone and the device in their hands ran on infrared and two AAs.

It added about thirty percent to the price of a television set. Over the twenty-five years that followed, the industry sold more than nine million televisions built around it (Zenith Electronics, 2026). The convenience found a large market.

Before it, changing the channel meant standing up, crossing the room, and turning a dial with detents that went chunk. Four seconds of work, maybe. Getting up gave you a moment to decide whether changing the channel was worth it.

After it, the exits multiplied, each one an obvious improvement. In 1984 the Supreme Court decided that taping a show off your television was fair use, supporting a practice that let viewers watch at another time (United States Supreme Court, 1984). The VCR made pause a household verb. The DVR turned skipping ahead into an expectation rather than a trick. Streaming offers another programme before the current one has finished. I find myself considering it while the ending is still playing.

With a phone beside me, I can start watching or reading something else while the film continues. I don't even have to decide to stop it.

One widely repeated explanation does not have the evidence claimed for it. The claim that human attention has fallen to eight seconds, below a goldfish's, is not established by its cited source. That number came from a marketing report in 2015 which cited a content aggregator that never produced a study and never answered the journalists who asked for one (Maybin (BBC More or Less), 2017). That report does not establish a measured comparison between human and goldfish attention.

The workplace research asks more specific questions. In 2005, people with clipboards followed office workers around and found they held one task for about eleven minutes before switching, with more than half of those stretches broken into by something (Mark, González & Harris, 2005). I'd love to tell you the figure has since collapsed to under a minute. I believe it has. But the early studies used humans with clipboards and the later ones use software watching screens, and the measurements cannot simply be treated as one continuous series.

Switching tasks has a cost of its own. When you leave one thing for another, part of your attention stays behind with what you left, and it measurably drags on whatever you moved to. The name for it is attention residue (Leroy, 2009). So a look at the phone doesn't cost you the glance. It costs the glance plus the re-entry, and getting back into a film isn't free, because a story is a structure you're holding up in your head the whole time.

The strongest argument against everything I've just said is also the oldest. Every generation believes a new medium is ruining attention. The novel was going to ruin young women. Radio would wreck conversation, then comics, then television, then video games, then phones. The research restarts from scratch each time, so nothing accumulates and every panic feels brand new to the people having it (Orben, 2020). That history gives me reason to be cautious about my own explanation.

My favourite example of how wrong a satisfying story can be is Augustine, writing around the year 397, describing Ambrose reading: the eyes went over the page, the heart searched out the meaning, and the voice and tongue were still (Augustine of Hippo, 397). For about a century that passage was used as proof that silent reading was so rare in the ancient world it stopped a bishop in his tracks. It was taken apart in 1997. Silent reading was perfectly well known in antiquity, and the passage is doing something else entirely (Gavrilov, 1997). I keep that one close, because it shows what a tidy historical narrative looks like from the inside when it happens to be false.

I can describe what is different in the room more confidently than what has happened to everyone's attention. There are more alternatives within reach, and moving to one takes very little effort. That seems relevant to what my brother and I find difficult, even though it cannot explain the whole experience.

Research on attention offers another part of the explanation. The account concerns how attention is directed and redirected. Attention really is asymmetric: one system holds your aim on whatever you chose, and a separate one, leaning to the right side, exists to yank you around when something unexpected turns up. The account describes how unexpected events can interrupt an ongoing task (Corbetta & Shulman, 2002). That's precisely the machine a notification was built for. It doesn't argue with the part of you that decided to watch a film. It goes around that part, to the one that evolved because a rustle in your peripheral vision used to matter more than whatever you were thinking about.

Games complicate my account of being unable to concentrate. Team Fortress Classic, StarCraft 2, Beyond All Reason, Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Magic the Gathering Online, Battlefield 6. I can lose an entire afternoon to any of them and never once reach for my phone. The man, the room, and the device six inches away are identical to the evening I couldn't manage an hour-long episode. Whatever explains the difficult television evenings also needs to account for the afternoons when I can stay with a game.

The conditions for what Csikszentmihalyi called flow were mapped decades ago, and there are three of them: a challenge matched to your skill, clear goals, and immediate feedback (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Hold a film up against that list. The challenge fits nothing, because you have no move to make. The goals belong to somebody on screen. The feedback loop is the length of the entire film, so you learn whether your attention was well spent about two hours after spending it. A game hands you all three every few seconds, telling you constantly whether your read on the situation was right, settling up continuously instead of at the end (Ryan, Rigby & Przybylski, 2006).

What I actually need from a game is progression and a sequence of events worth reacting to. That is the same list in plainer words. And it isn't a solved problem either. Half of what arrives on Steam now is rough at launch, sometimes openly in alpha, fun for a stretch and then out of road. The top end isn't built yet. So the games hold me the way they do partly because the good ones are old, which is a sentence I'd rather not have written.

A definition of boredom also seemed familiar. Boredom isn't having nothing to do. Boredom is wanting to be absorbed and failing (Eastwood et al., 2012). That describes wanting to be involved in something and being unable to settle into it.

Which is exactly the sofa in the back half of an hour-long episode. I wanted to be absorbed. I wasn't being given the conditions for it, and I couldn't generate them myself, because watching isn't something you can do harder. Picking up the phone gave me something else to try.

The obvious answer is the theatre, which was a machine for holding people still, and every part of it was load-bearing. You paid, which is a commitment. You drove there, which is another. The room went dark so there was nothing else to look at. Your phone didn't exist. Leaving meant standing up in front of strangers and climbing over knees. Every exit had been removed on purpose, by people who understood that an audience needs help. Those conditions made it easier to stay with a film, even through a stretch that might have lost me at home.

I haven't been inside one in over five years. The ticket and the snacks come to real money, the sit is long, and I haven't thought much of the storytelling lately, so the arithmetic stopped working. Which complicates my own argument, since the man claiming that room did the work is also the one who quit going.

There's a second reason I quit, and it has nothing to do with attention. I can recognize the shape of a soundstage behind the green screen now, and after I've picked it out it becomes difficult to watch anything else. It's an exit that opens from inside the film, which nobody has to hand me and I can't put my phone in another room to avoid.

I can miss the conditions that helped me watch while still appreciating the convenience of watching at home. And some of the difficulty, including noticing how a set was made, would follow me back to the cinema.

So I stopped trying to fix my attention and started fixing the room. The phone goes somewhere else now, rather than face down on the arm of the sofa, which is still four seconds away. It is easier to leave it alone when I have to get up to fetch it. I don't pause a film to look something up, since stopping it is the exit and the search is where I was already headed. And my brother and I stopped agreeing to films neither of us wanted, which turns out to have been most of the problem. Sometimes we had agreed simply to be agreeable.

I also need to decide what I want from the evening. If I want absorption I go find a short enough feedback loop to supply the conditions. If I want to be told a story, I owe it a room where that can work. What fails is demanding absorption from something that structurally can't provide it while sitting six inches from a device built to interrupt me.

I still don't have a complete explanation for why an hour of television became harder. I can put the phone elsewhere and choose something my brother and I both want to watch. Those changes are available to us while I keep wondering about the rest.