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Youth Spend More Time on Web Than TV
ChopsMIDI writes "According to a survey of 2,618 people, aged 13 to 24, teenagers and young adults spend more time on the Internet than watching television, indicating a shift in media consumption for a demographic prized by advertisers. On average, young people said they spent nearly 17 hours online each week, not including time used to read and send electronic mail, compared with almost 14 hours spent watching television and 12 hours listening to the radio."
Lets hope they are using interactive forms (like this comment form) and not just wathing flash movies or playing mmorpgs.
I mean, look at all the services that the Internet can provide:
Chat, Shopping, Gaming, Education, Music, Movies AND TV (I mean, who hasn't downloaded a Simpsons episode or two off Kazaa?)
Add to that the fact that Reality TV (TM) is killing off all of the creativity in television; I want to see comedies, movies and interesting documentaries. I don't care if Joe Bloggs from London has won £10 000 for pretending to be a chicken in the streets.
For me, TV can be too much of a passive experience after a short while. If I'm gonna stare at a screen for hours, why not be fragging AND chatting to a few people in Day of Defeat?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Certainly this inclination toward the web over TV is one reason that advertising will have to drastically change. As spam filters, and pop-up killers, and page-based context filters develop, it will get harder and harder to put the "sell" on younger people. (All people, for that matter.) I think the P2P vs. filtering evolutionary wars are a harbinger of things to come. Individuals do not like being manipulated by corporate imagery. My fear is that eventually a legal argument will be made that since an advertiser has paid for space on a page, it will be illegal for somebody to mess with that page, since the page is the property of some other corporation and not of the individual who views it.
Maybe as an analogy, you can imagine some hot-shot electronics guy building a special jammer that only jams beer commercials and leaves all other content in place. Clearly beer companies would hate it, and no doubt the FCC already says they control all transmitting of public content and not just the non-advertising stuff (cmp. the small power FM station fiascoes). Since this is the rule in Wavelength Land, I can see nothing to stop it becoming the rule in Web Land.
Moreover, if congress is willing to introduce bills to make P2P software illegal, I have little reason to think their $$$ masters will hold back on anything else. I think getting something like a super-Freenet up and running with (effectively) unbreakable crypto is the only hope of keeping us from some weird oligarcic socialism.
brinticus
P.S. I don't mind clones, its me being like everybody else I hate.
You may be joking but there are actually serious implications of this. My mother is a teacher at a secondary school (a UK version of high school) and she has relayed to me anecdotes about kids using AOLesque language in their exams. Don't forget that the SMS mobile phone text message boom was mainly due to 13 year old girls sending pointless messages back and forth:
OMG Joe iz so hot! U shud defnatly ask hm out!
And what do you get, kids replacing 'you' with 'u' in their exam papers and coursework and thinking nothing of it because it's part of their everyday language. We all know how young teens spell things on the 'net....
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
It's alarming that big companies like Forbes associate Internet time with TV, using the blanket statement, "media consumption". I don't know about you but as a member of several online forums and an occational website content producer myself, someone who uses the internet as a tool to look up information, I don't really feel like I am sitting here consuming a media product.
Now, don't mind as I once again don my tin-foil hat.
You see this language everywhere. We are all consumers. We consume things. That's our purpose. "They" produce product and push it out, and we consume. Is Forbes's language evidence that big media still doesn't "Get It" with respect to the power of creation the Internet provides to us lowly consumption robots? Does the author really believe that Internet use soley consists of consumption of products?
Or is it one of the many subtle ways large companies push the idea that we are just consuming pac-men, and that nothing we do is imporant unless it involves consuming someone's product.
I think the consistant use of the word "consumer" to describe PEOPLE is evidence that this is a widespread attempt by those in charge (large corporations) to make their world-views come true through the force of subtle language changes.
Ok, off with the tin-foil hat! Good day.
In a time where kids are convinced that oral sex is not sex, email not being seem as online is no surprise. The Internet is what you see in IE, isn't it?