Why I may never use the phrase “new media” again
What I don’t know is almost everything, I admit, and that everything is mushrooming in size daily. But today I did add a fascinatingly useful new term to my vocabulary by learning the meaning of the word grok. (Hint — it’s a verb and it’s actually been around since 1961).
I came across the word in a post on GigaOM last Friday by the site’s founder Om Malik. Titled “There is No New Media: It’s All New Consumption,” the post is a bit of a two-by-four aimed at the thickish, oldish heads running most of traditional media.
Excerpt:
“For the media industry (which is video, music and print), there has been one more, and perhaps the farthest-reaching, failure: the inability of the folks to grok that today’s audience is not tomorrow’s audience. It goes without saying there’s a whole generation of folk that has either grown up, or are growing up, on the Internet. Their consumption and online behavior is going to be predicated on a distribution medium whose basic premise is abundance. They will find, curate and consume on their own terms, on their own choice of screens and on their own time.”
Clarifying phrase, isn’t it — online behavior is going to be predicated on a distribution medium whose basic premise is abundance.
Highly recommended reading if you want some insight into a big picture perspective of media consumption trends. And if you aren’t familiar with another phrase — Generation D — it’s a chance to remedy that also. See the full post here.
Television losing younger viewers
The Internet has surpassed television as the first choice among 16-24 year-olds in Europe, according to a new study released by a media trade organization, the European Interactive Advertising Association (EIAA).
Titled “Shifting Traditions: Internet Rivalling TV In Media Consumption Stakes,” the September 2007 survey is based on more than 7,000 random telephone interviews, according to the EIAA press release. Countries represented were the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden.
The study found that in the 16-24 year-old age span:
- 82% use the Internet between 5 and 7 days each week while only 77% watch TV as regularly (a decrease of 5% since last year);
- 10% more time is spent on the Internet than in watching television;
- almost half (48%) claim their TV consumption has dropped off as a direct result of the Internet.
Other key findings of the survey found that 169 million people are now online across ten European markets. That growth is being driven by increased use of the Internet among seniors and women. Internet users are staying online nearly 12 hours a week on average, the report said, and social networking sites, MySpace and Facebook as two examples, are now visited by 42% of Internet users.
