Second-screen viewing is now common practice among millennials. The age when friends gathered on the sofa for some Saturday night TV without checking their Twitter feed is over. But rather than resisting this change some producers are riding the wave of innovation. French filmmaker Antoine Viviani’s latest documentary In Limbo asked viewers for their social-media data in order to personalise his film’s narrative, while multi award-winning sitcom Modern Family has just launched an experimental episode, aired last Wednesday, that plays itself out entirely on a character's laptop screen.

The episode, called Connection Lost, represents a more mainstream acknowledgement of our interconnected lives. The fairly straightforward narrative – Claire (Julie Bowen) has had an argument with her daughter Haley (Sarah Hyland) and is trying to get in contact with her –  filmed using an iPad and an iPhone, plays out on applications like Skype, Facebook and social-media sites like Facebook, on which she chats to various family members. Instead of just using the technology as a gimmick, the shows' producers also saw it as an opportunity to write in otherwise impossible jokes; (Claire regularly contradicts what she says with her actions on the screen).

Does this mean that our TV screens are now going to be become an endless loop of repeated screens? No, or at least hopefully not. But as we’re spending more and more of our lives online, it’s unsurprising that media outlets are gradually responding to this. Pioneers like media scholar Henry Jenkins have long talked about a move towards multi-platform storytelling, where viewers are far more immersed in a world. Modern Family's latest episode reflects that, while delivering some comedy gold.