Editing 2371: Election Screen Time

{{comic
| number    = 2371
| date      = October 12, 2020
| title     = Election Screen Time
| image     = election_screen_time.png
| titletext = Feels like I picked a bad year to try to start having a healthy relationship with political news.
}}

==Explanation==
Cueball has an app on his phone which informs him of the time spent using it for various purposes. These are typically used to monitor one's own, or maybe one's teenage child's, (over)use of games, social media apps, general browsers, etc., and highlight any surprising issues.  It is unclear whether this is: a specific analyser, that somehow identifies just this narrow subset of uses; a more general app, currently filtered to give information on just these two politics-related interactions via some complex heuristic method; or he actually does nothing ''but'' these two classifiable things, on this particular device.

Whichever is the case, it is currently displaying and comparing just two curiously detailed statistics - the time used staying informed about politics, and the time he has spent reading election updates - and nothing else. The total time recorded would be a large slice of someone's typical day, if the report is for the last 24 hours, but is overwhelmingly dominated by the latter activity whatever the duration covered.

The comic reflects that most people spend a lot of time consuming news speculating about who will win the upcoming election, even though reading these "updates" will have no impact on the election because people are unlikely to change their minds because of them. People spend very little time researching information that will allow them to make informed decisions about voting, which is an important civic duty.  In addition, a recent article in ''{{w|The Atlantic}}'' said that "[https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2020/10/reading-too-much-political-news-bad-happiness/616651/ Reading Too Much Political News Is Bad for Your Well-Being]".

The title text suggests regret about the time spent consuming political news, possibly reflecting the sentiment that the {{w|2020 United States presidential election}} has been especially divisive with little productive dialogue. The title text might also be a reference to the movie {{w|Airplane!}} (directly referencing the 1957 movie ''Zero Hour!'') where one of the most popular gags is when Steve McCroskey first says "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit smoking", then "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit amphetamines", "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue" and so on.

Randall has previously remarked on poor time allocation in [[1445: Efficiency]], in which he admits that he reduces his overall efficiency by spending too much time figuring out which approach to a problem was more efficient.  In [[2282: Coronavirus Worries]], he indicated that worrying about other people's actions is much less healthy (although unfortunately more common) than looking after your own health.

==Transcript==

[Cueball is looking at his phone screen time report. The screen appears above his head]

Screen Time Report
:Staying informed about politics like a good civic-minded person
:<span style="background-color: #4f7ef9; color: #ffffff">[tiny blue bar]</span> 26m

:Reading election updates that won't affect your actions in any way but slightly improve your knowledge about what's going to happen in a few weeks
:<span style="background-color: #4f7ef9; color: #ffffff">[really extremely long blue bar-chart bar]</span> 9h14m

{{comic discussion}}
[[Category:Elections]]
[[Category:Comics featuring Cueball]]
[[Category:Comics with color]]
[[Category:Phones]]
[[Category:Screen Time]]