The last appointment we all keep

Think about the last time you watched something at the exact moment it went out, unpaused, because watching it later would have meant having it spoiled. For most of us the honest answer is sport, and not much else. Everything else we have learned to watch on our own clock. This week the World Cup interrupts that, and the interruption is the interesting part.

The drift away from the shared screen is real and recent. Last year the Netflix drama Adolescence became the first streaming show to top Britain's weekly television ratings, beating the traditional broadcasters at their own game — a sign, if one were needed, that the centre of gravity has moved to on demand, where everyone watches alone and at a time of their choosing. Netflix has overtaken individual BBC channels for stretches of the year. The default British evening is now a household of four watching four different things on four screens.

Live football is the great exception, and the World Cup is the exception's exception. It runs on ITV and the BBC — free, linear, unpaused — and it asks the whole country to show up at the same minute or miss it. When England play Croatia at 9pm on Wednesday, part of what makes it matter is that millions of other people are watching the same pass, the same miss, the same goal, at the same second. You cannot binge a World Cup. That is the point of it.

This is where it touches the question we keep circling. As work asks less of our time, the screen is where a lot of the freed hours will go — and the screen has spent a decade teaching us to spend them alone. The algorithm is very good at giving each of us our own thing. It is not built to give us the same thing. A tournament is a reminder that some pleasures are larger when they're shared and shrink when they're personalised, and that the technology nudging us toward solitary viewing is quietly making a choice on our behalf about which kind we get.

None of which helps if you don't care about football, and many won't. For that household the World Cup is four weeks of counter-programming heaven — the streaming services know it, and bank their new dramas for the gaps when the other half of the country is occupied. If you've a list saved for "later," later is Wednesday at nine. The split screen of a tournament summer is its own small comedy: one room roaring at a television, the next room finally getting through the box set in peace.

But I would give the live thing its due before it's gone. The shared minute is not guaranteed to survive; it survives, for now, on sport and almost nothing else. Watch the match if you can, even if you don't care who wins, for the increasingly unusual experience of doing the same thing as everyone else at the same time. We will miss it when the algorithm finally wins.