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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."
I don't even watch TV these days, with the ocassional exception for the Simpsons and maybe a movie or two. The internet is much better. It doesn't show you 30 minutes of ads per movie, content is just available there and not during a specific day and time, and the content is much more interesting.
Here (Spain) it seems that the producers of some shows are brain damaged. A while ago I turned on the TV to see if there was anything, saw a bit of some "Putin's daughter" crap, and went back to my computer.
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?
That's about 2.5 hours of internet access per day, plus 2 hours of tv and 1.5 hours of listening to the radio. So either these kids are spending 6 hours a day (after school no less) sitting in front of various electronic babysitters or they've learned how to multi-task.
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.
things are changing:
:-)
1. first, the music industry loses its ability to control the marketing of new music to people because the people themselves have control of the distribution technology (i.e. Napster, Kazaa )
2. then, the television industry loses its control of what people think because the internet allows people once again to control what they read, hear, and see.
It sounds to me like the whole media industry is losing its control over people and we can thank technology for doing this for us!
-- Betting on the survival of the media industry is a serious risk. I advise investing elsewhere.
Well this is the conventional wisdom, and I used to believe it. But having played Everquest off and on for a while, I'd have to say that a decent TV program is at least as stimulating and thought provoking is sitting in place, and occasionally pressing a button or two. And this isn't just true of EQ, many games may be "interactive" but they aren't requiring too many brain cells to fire.
Personally I put both sitting online and sitting in front of the tv in the same class. I'm glad that one displaces the other, but you'd still be better off getting up, getting outside, and moving around once in while.
As much as I hate MTV and the crap that they force on the viewers they still have, I find that they are approaching this transition in a positive manner. There are several shows that are utilizing the multitasking potential of the internet with television, in order to receive feedback and make shows interactive. MTV2 does a show that requires viewers to log on and vote for the next video in realtime. This is the way to combine your programming with the power of the internet and not lose out. By making your TV programming customizable to some extent by the viewers, I would think they would be less likely to change channels or even turn the TV off altogether.
So, what, is this our generation's "When I was YOUR age" event?
Previous: "When I was YOUR age, sonny, we used to go outside and play baseball out by the sandlot! Not all this TV watching crap you kids today do..."
Today: "When I was YOUR age, sonny, we used to watch TV all day on the couch! Not all this new-fangled 'internet' crap you kids today do..."
Future: "When I was YOUR age, sonny, we used to log onto the internet all the time on the computer! Not this new-fangled starship crap you kids today do..."
Demanding constant attention will only lead to attention.