Youth Spend More Time on Web Than TV 285
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."
good! (Score:5, Interesting)
Is this _that_ surprising? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
And you wonder why RIAA is worried about KaZaA? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:good! (Score:2, Interesting)
Anyway, every hour spent online is way better than any hour spent on TV. Being online keeps your brain working, I doubt TV does that very often.
The only main drawback I can think about compared to TV are RSI, tendinitis and such. Mostly because it can harm virtually everyone, even the total slackers that manage to do nothing on the net (well, like me for example...)
- Hadriven
Makes sense (Score:4, Interesting)
The web has the potential to be a very powerful medium. Literally everything you'd ever want to know (from movie reviews to why the sky is blue) is only one click away. I know whenever I have a question, the first place I turn to is google. Kids figured out a while back that it's more fun to have control over the material you're sitting in front of, as opposed to say, watching another episode of Dharma and Greg.
The only downside to this is that advertisers figured out that a majority of the people in the world use this fancy new "intraweb" thingy, and decided to litter it with their banners and spam. If you can sidestep that little roadblock however, the web is still a wonderful thing.
Advertising (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
What about IM vs Phone? (Score:2, Interesting)
Where and how... (Score:2, Interesting)
Was it outside of a shopping mall? Was it forms mailed out from junk mail lists? What was the income range of the families involved? This would be more interesting to me, as it seems that would tell more about who is moving tword the internet as a whole - when even the lower income brackets are spending more time in front of a computer.
Re:What kind of affect will this have on literacy? (Score:5, Interesting)
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....
Media Consumption? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
What did you expect? (Score:5, Interesting)
You can't go back to TV (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm Surprised... (Score:2, Interesting)
I'm surprised by that. I wouldn't think teens would listen to that much radio. If they are spending that much time on the internet, shouldn't they just be downloading songs for commercial-free enjoyment? I know I probably put in quite a few hours a week listening to the radio, but that's because I'm a freak who listens to talk radio.
reminds me of a high school physics story (Score:3, Interesting)
(Disclaimer: Totally OT) That reminds me of something that happened to me in high school physics class. The teacher was doing a demonstration witha frequency generator hooked up to a speaker. He kept raising the frequency in increments and had the class raise their hands until they couldn't hear it anymore. As he kept testing higher and higher frequencies eventually everyone's hand dropped except mine (i seem to be able to hear white noise and the like better than most). He supposedly went up another step and asked if I heard anything. I said "yeah I do" and he proclaimed "Well it's not even turned on. You're imagining it. Ha ha!" And of course the whole class was laughing at me thinking I was lying. But I could still hear it!
After class as I was exiting the room I walked by a TV facing the back wall and I realized that was where the sound was coming from. It turns out the tv was left on and showing a blue screen. I was hearing the whine from the TV
Re:Email Isn't Time Online? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's called a queue. The mail client stacks up messages to send. When you go online, the client sends all the queued mail.
I don't know why they wouldn't count email in this study, wouldn't it be more interesting to know how much time the kids spend on internet activities instead of how long their computer is connected to an ISP? Then again, since Yahoo paid for the survey, I suppose they only want information about the Web...
Either way, this should show why the MPAA are so anti internet. People are spending more time on the internet and less time watching TV and movies. Even if it's looking up movie reviews and celebrity gossip. I bet Entertainment Tonight's ratings are dying! ;-)
I'm sure not. (Score:3, Interesting)
I mean, hell, I admit, I keep on the TV as background noise, but there's just some stuff I have to change the channel for. It's hard finding something on at 5pm EST that isn't an infomercial. If it weren't for FoodTV, BBC America, TLC, Discovery and similar channels, there'd be many more hours of the day when I wouldn't be able to find something worth watching.
When a good program does finally make it to the air, they cancel it after a season (Mad Jack the Pirate) or two (Invader Zim). They put things in bad time slots (Futurama, always pre-empted by sports when it was in first run). If it weren't for the random stuff that somehow manages to make it on the air -- Good Eats, Coupling, Monster Garage, we'd be in even more trouble.
So, anyway, this brings up the real question -- is 'the Internet' winning because it's better than TV, or is TV losing because it's worse than 'the Internet'?
Re:What kind of affect will this have on literacy? (Score:3, Interesting)
Language is not static, and nobody has every suggested that English spelling has no room for improvement.
Only in France is language controlled by committee. Everywhere else author usage reigns supreme.
Re:Ok let's see... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is *good* news, not *bad* news. (Score:3, Interesting)
Sitting in front of a TV, you do absolutely nothing. You slouch, with remote and hand, and stare at the TV while frequently drooling, grabbing one's self, burping, or snacking. This is horrid behavior - nothing positive comes of it. Period.
At least on a computer, even if playing MMORPGs, the user must *interact*, which is something television lacks. Televions is a broadcast medium whereas the Internet is interactive. The user must do some work in order to achieve satisfaction. With a TV, they must simply watch. On the web, they must read or strategize, or at the very least point and click, which is an exercise of hand-eye coordination.
I'd take a computer geek MMORPG no friend having dorkahontas over a TV addicted vegaholic that sits around and watches Space Ghost Coast To Coast all day.