I was watching Al Gore on the news this morning, and he’s promoting a new cable channel called “Current,” due August 1st. He said something about reaching out, allowing the younger generation of this country to participate in democracy through television, “the dominant medium for the 18-35 crowd.” (Quote’s not exact.)
Is TV really the dominant medium for the young’uns? I know plenty of computer-illiterate people my age (I’m 22), but I know plenty who are never seen without a laptop in hand (I’d be one of them if I could afford it).
And even if TV beats the internet in sheer numbers, surely it’s on the way out as such. The internet, by design, is more democratic than television anyway, and the youngest third of the 18-35 demographic has grown up with the internet. I can’t see current ten-year old relying more heavily upon television when they’re 22.
TV is a passive form of entertainment, whereas, the internet is more (inter)active.
I can’t see TV’s ability to entertain and inform (to some extent) deminishing over the next generation. I think it will become more interactive through new features that allow users to do some of their own “programming” by selecting the channels and programs they want to view when they want to view them (a la TiVo).
I’m 34, so most of my real-life friends are filling out the top end of Mr.Gore’s bracket there, and yep, it’s TV all the way. I’m the weird one in my extended circle that’s always online and rarely knows what all the cool new shows are.
The reasons range from “Just don’t have time to play about online” to “I work at a computer all day, why mess with it at home” and a few “I can’t figure out how to stop virii and malware so mine never works anyway” thrown in there too.
So yeah, it might seem off to you but rings true for me. Most of my friends that do use them have one or two dedicated uses, say e-mail and espn.com, and don’t consider the 'net as a news resource.
Something like 75% of people have Internet access from home. That’s still a good deal lower than TV, though I’m sure a lot of that other 25% are not 18-35. The group that hangs out here, or the people Dopers know, is probably not representative.
Every form of mass communications has come onto the scene with the prediction that it will be more interactive and participatory than its predecessor and, therefore, benefit democracy.
In truth the advantages of one over the other, if they even exist come so slowly it’s almost impossible to measure.
Not really true. I haven’t watched TV for at least a couple weeks. Prior to that I used it to watch DVDs. Granted, that’s less than normal even for me, but in the past 6 months the most non-DVD TV I’ve watched has been Oprah and Food TV reruns while working out on the spin bike or as background noise while I cooked or cleaned the kitchen.
The Internet, on the other hand, commands my attention for a minimum of 6 hours a day. Far and away, the Internet is my dominent medium. TV doesn’t even command ten percent of the time I spend on the Internet in a given week. I’m hardly a majority, but I also guess that I’m far from a teeny tiny minority.
That’s true for me now, only because my computer’s dead. Before that, I’d go weeks without turning it on (except for 24 and baseball). When I get a new computer, it’ll be back to normal.
Being a democratic medium isn’t good from everyone’s perspective. Sure, the internet provides more than a thousand times as many websites as television provides shows, but does everyone care about that? Some people want entertainment mainly for the purpose of talking it over with their friends afterwards, in which case “American Idol” is better than any internet source, because everyone watches “American Idol”.
The internet is already used for political ends in the recent election, to almost no noticeable effect.
Since the sample shows he announced with are practically little movies, of course they will have more impact than a blog.