{"id":1768,"date":"2026-08-02T13:11:30","date_gmt":"2026-08-02T13:11:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1768"},"modified":"2026-08-02T13:11:30","modified_gmt":"2026-08-02T13:11:30","slug":"which-screen-is-the-good-screen-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1768","title":{"rendered":"Which Screen Is the \u2018Good Screen\u2019 Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

The videos that Instagram suggests in my never-ending \u201cFor You\u201d feed are usually of a constellation of women. They\u2019re strangers, but I call them \u201cmy girls.\u201d One of them is remodeling her house; one is always cleaning and \u201cresetting\u201d the van she lives in; one is sampling pasta and sandwiches at various New York establishments. And each has something special that I can\u2019t explain to you\u2014a je ne sais quoi, a curious style of speaking\u2014so I\u2019ve come to look forward to my regular glimpses of their lives, which I get when I scroll in bed before I go to sleep each night.<\/p>\n

Read more Trump\u2019s Literal Gilded Age<\/a><\/p>\n

I regard these strangers as my intimates in a way, even though some of them are not people I think I would like if I actually met them. One morning, I was watching one on my living-room television while sipping my coffee. My husband walked into the room and winced as one of the women changed into a perfect re-creation of an American Girl\u2013doll outfit (very theater kid, not his thing). I felt a flash of defensiveness\u2014she makes everything by hand! She has a real sense of self! Not to mention a seemingly sweet relationship with her father and pet birds. I kept scrolling and was relieved that another one of my girls hadn\u2019t appeared. She often records herself eating a frozen dinner on her couch while watching police body-cam footage on YouTube to unwind. And I mean no disrespect to her, but if she had shown up, I would have lunged for the remote.<\/p>\n

You might be wondering: Why was I watching Instagram on my TV? Instagram\u2019s vice president of product, Tessa Lyons-Laing, has referred to TV as the company\u2019s \u201cnext frontier.\u201d As it tries to compete with YouTube and Netflix, Instagram is apparently looking for ways to be \u2026 both of them. And so it has launched a stand-alone service for various streaming devices, which it recently expanded with new features to help \u201cfriends and family watch together.\u201d This caught my attention: I wanted to try taking the \u201cbad\u201d screen (my phone) and putting it onto the \u201cgood\u201d screen (my TV) to see how it would make me (and the people around me) feel.<\/p>\n

Years ago, the \u201cgood screen versus bad screen\u201d meme originated as a joke about having an office job. The \u201cbad\u201d screen was a desktop computer at work, whereas the \u201cgood\u201d screen was a personal laptop, full of one\u2019s own, delightful, self-chosen digital activities. But in 2022, following the coronavirus-pandemic lockdowns, the writer Kate Lindsay noted a shift. When people referred to the \u201cbad\u201d screen, they now seemed to be talking about their smartphone, which they felt hopelessly dependent on, and when they mentioned the \u201cgood\u201d screen, they were referring to the humble television, which now felt wholesome and safe. \u201cWe\u2019re so convinced that it\u2019s in our best interest to reverse the effects of social media that even watching a 30-minute TV show uninterrupted seems constructive,\u201d Lindsay observed. But maybe, four years later, the 30-minute-show part is negotiable. Perhaps \u201cgood\u201d could come just from giving our thumbs a break, looking up instead of down, and permitting other people to see what we\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

My husband was initially wary of adding his Instagram account to our living-room TV, but he acquiesced, and we had kind of a blast watching his feed together. Most of the videos were of male comedians I didn\u2019t recognize; I sounded like the trope of a Boomer mom as I repeatedly asked, \u201cDo you know him?\u201d whenever a new guy showed up. I didn\u2019t mean \u201cAre you friends?\u201d; I meant \u201cAre they Your Guys?\u201d Sometimes they were, and I was honored to meet them. Sometimes they weren\u2019t; they were just guys. We both laughed to the point of tears at a video that some guy had shared of his dad trying to teach him to bunt a baseball when he was 10 years old. I manually liked it with the remote control and then sent it to myself, from my husband, via direct message. On my TV.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis intrigues me,\u201d Jonathan Gray, a professor of media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me when I asked him about the app. Scrolling has always had a social element, he said, and people will often show a funny or interesting video to the person next to them. But he was skeptical of whether they would want to share every bit of their feed with their loved ones. \u201cIt\u2019s one thing when I turn my phone to my wife and say, \u2018Hey, you\u2019ll like this,\u2019 but 90 percent of what I see, she won\u2019t want to watch,\u201d he said. \u201cIt seems kind of painful.\u201d Plus, his wife is learning how to whittle at the moment, and he doesn\u2019t want to watch a bunch of whittling videos.<\/p>\n

Read more Has Gen Z Saved\u2014Or Just Changed\u2014Movies?<\/a><\/p>\n

Gray also noted that the recommendation algorithms sometimes take big swings and throw new things at users to learn whether they\u2019ll be interested. One might worry a little about the big swings that could appear on your TV, which to others in the room might appear to be something you\u2019ve already expressed enthusiasm about. When I asked the Instagram spokesperson Christine Pai whether the TV app would filter out any weird stuff, she told me that both apps are using the same recommendation system. (The only specific difference she cited is that the TV app will give an edge to horizontal videos, because they are better suited for the display.)<\/p>\n

The app does allow users to play themed \u201cchannels\u201d based on their preestablished interests, so you don\u2019t necessarily have to show off your entire, highly variable and sometimes unpredictable feed. The idea with the channels seems to be that making the secret, private shame of scrolling into a collaborative activity will give it a new place in the home. It can be more like watching America\u2019s Funniest Home Videos<\/em> together after dinner and less like sitting side by side, staring silently at something in your lap. People feel ambivalent about scrolling feeds, Marika L\u00fcders, a professor of media and communication at the University of Oslo, wrote to me on this point. We find it entertaining at times, but we also feel embarrassed and guilty about it. To her, moving Instagram from a phone to a TV seems like \u201ca strategy to increase the status of short-form videos,\u201d by putting them on a screen that people (currently) feel less anxiety about.<\/p>\n

That makes sense to me, though I find it just as easy to imagine how this may backfire for the company. Many people who are attempting to cut back on their Instagram use remove the app from their phone and use only the desktop-computer version, which is clunkier and less comfortable to scroll through for hours. Using it is so nonintuitive and unnatural that it calls attention to the absurdity of one\u2019s habit. Moving Instagram to a bigger screen, then, is usually a route not to normalizing it in that new space but instead to severing ties with it altogether. The differences between a phone and a TV are even more dramatic and may be even more off-putting.<\/p>\n

Surely the novelty will wear off. Last week, while visiting my sister-in-law and her boyfriend, my husband and I asked them to show us their feeds on their TV. My sister-in-law\u2019s was funny because it was full of wedding-planning content\u2014she\u2019s currently waiting on the requisite engagement ring\u2014and because she kept getting videos of this one baby who\u2019s obsessed with Bad Bunny. Her boyfriend got a hairless cat, a guy pretending to be Wolverine, and a recipe for butter-chicken macaroni and cheese. Those were a little funny, too, but because you don\u2019t know him, you don\u2019t get why and you don\u2019t care. After 20 minutes or so, we got bored of the experiment and left for a baseball game. Later, in the quiet of my hotel room, I went back to my own, private phone.<\/p>\n

Read more Taking Care of the Father Who Broke My Heart<\/a><\/p>\n<\/section>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Instagram TV brings the endless scroll to your television.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1767,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1768","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-technology"],"yoast_head":"\nWhich Screen Is the \u2018Good Screen\u2019 Now? - Commercial Relocation Pros<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1768\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Which Screen Is the \u2018Good Screen\u2019 Now? - Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Instagram TV brings the endless scroll to your television.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/commercialrelocationpros.com\/?p=1768\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Commercial Relocation Pros\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2026-08-02T13:11:30+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"admin\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\\\/\\\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"Article\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1768#article\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1768\"},\"author\":{\"name\":\"admin\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/#\\\/schema\\\/person\\\/3a3374a445f1b5d4852b1d7c15b9fe3a\"},\"headline\":\"Which Screen Is the \u2018Good Screen\u2019 Now?\",\"datePublished\":\"2026-08-02T13:11:30+00:00\",\"mainEntityOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1768\"},\"wordCount\":1395,\"commentCount\":0,\"image\":{\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1768#primaryimage\"},\"thumbnailUrl\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/wp-content\\\/uploads\\\/2026\\\/08\\\/db9a09c988946da664515f0827250abf.avif\",\"articleSection\":[\"Technology\"],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"CommentAction\",\"name\":\"Comment\",\"target\":[\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1768#respond\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1768\",\"url\":\"https:\\\/\\\/commercialrelocationpros.com\\\/?p=1768\",\"name\":\"Which Screen Is the \u2018Good Screen\u2019 Now? 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