Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.