media glut => new routine development?
Oct 1st, 2007 by Gideon Strauss
1. Instead of substituting old media with new media, people simply increase the number of media they use.
2. For many people this means that media become wallpaper - on in the background, and usually receiving only part of a person’s attention.
3. To cope with the large number of media used, many people are developing new media use routines (”Radio channel: listen to during breakfast / News show before going to bed / webpage news skimmed through when arriving at work / call to mother on sunday / SMS to say I’m on my way”)
4. The wallpaper & new routines approach runs counter to the efforts of most media providers to expand attention monopolies.
October 2nd, 2007 at 12:30 pm
Number four is not strictly right. Yes each company wants to increase the amount of media market they hold, but they often do this by turning themselves into wallpaper, by requiring less and less attention and by giving a shallower and shallower measure of the world they’re talking about.
Running counter to that — writing longer, more thoughtful story, asking tougher questions, delving into themes — may sound good, but is there any market for it?
October 2nd, 2007 at 10:29 pm
Radio is dead. Print is dying. TV is coughing a little.
It is the nature of computing and the Internet to absorb and replace nearly all other media. I think there would be little attention-competition in the homes of younger, tech-savvy types.
October 11th, 2007 at 9:31 am
I still enjoy silence at times of my day- no radio, no hum, no chattering on the telephone. I don’t get enough of it really.
October 11th, 2007 at 8:12 pm
Sarah: I can’t wait until I’m older and can’t hear sounds around 20-23KHz anymore (apparently 20s or so). Nearly everything that plugs into a wall socket screeches in that range, very quietly. And so I almost never hear silence.
October 14th, 2007 at 9:52 am
Sarah: Three cheers for times of silence!
AO: Three cheers for internet-accessible radio. I am delighted with radio mix in our house: world pop via KEXP and KCRW, classical music plus via CBC2.
Daniel: I guess there is such a market - consider on the one hand The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, and on the other The New Republic and Commentary.
October 14th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Daniel (addendum): Although the business model for both of those markets is different from the model of, say, People magazine.
October 14th, 2007 at 6:41 pm
I too enjoy CBC2, but I tend to access it via satellite television, which is not (technically) radio.