Scale for measuring mediated temporal experiences published [23.03.26]
How much time we spend in front of a screen can be easily determined by glancing at the clock, but our intuition sometimes tells us something completely different. Jana Dombrowski and Sabine Trepte therefore propose the newly developed concept of “felt time,” which allows us to measure time as people actually experience it while using media.
Source: Communication Methods and Measures
Time flies when we’re on the phone with family. It drags on when we’re waiting for a software update. And sometimes it even seems to stand still when we’re completely immersed in a movie. Time is not just something we can measure—it is something that we experience. To better understand these subjective experiences of time, we propose the concept of “felt time” in our new article. It is intended to help researchers and other stakeholders to describe and measure how people perceive the passage of time while using media.
In two studies involving more than 1,000 media users, we investigated how screen time actually feels. This led, among other things, to the development of the Felt Time Scale (FTS) and its short version (FTS-S)—tools that allow to capture different experiences of time during media use within surveys.
Our findings show that how people experience time with media cannot be described by screen time in hours and minutes. This very sense of time, however, is closely linked to media experiences that have long occupied researchers—such as whether people feel well-entertained, whether they enter a state of flow, whether they develop feelings of guilt about their usage, or even whether they tend toward problematic usage patterns. The conclusion: How much time people actually spend with media is sometimes secondary. What matters is how that time feels to them.
In doing so, the article also suggests a new paradigm. The question of how many hours and minutes people spend with media each day has been a central concern of communication research for decades. However, many studies have cast doubt on the reliability and validity of measures capturing time spent with media. Rather than attempting to measure media use time with ever-more-precise methods, such as passive sensing, our proposal is to focus on time as it is actually experienced.
The article was published in the journal Communication Methods and Measures: https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2026.2627548
