Alan Rubin claimed that “instrumental” people performed this activity more intentionally than “ritualized” practitioners of this activity. Building on his work for the Cultural Indicators Project, George Gerbner formulated the “Mean World Index” that measures the effects of this activity. John Ellis described this activity in terms of “segmentation” to refine Raymond Williams’s claim (-5[1])that it replaces the experience of “sequence” with “flow.” Stuart Hall first formulated the (*) “encoding/decoding (-5[1])model” of communication in the context of practitioners of this activity. It doesn’t require Morse code, but this activity massively increases the information-action ratio, per a book that analogizes doing this action to taking the drug soma. For 10 points, Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death attacks what form of media consumption that typifies the “couch (10[1])potato?” ■END■ (10[2])