eric rochow : social media handyman

I had lost this article from last month, but its a good one. Those of you who have TimesSelect can read the whole article here. Comments are from a forum held at the Nextfest last month in NY, and David Carr’s own experiences.

THE MEDIA EQUATION; Idiosyncratic And Personal, PC Edges TV David Carr:

Jennifer Feikin, the director of Google Video and the only panelist not invested in the old model, did her level best to let sleeping dogs lie, calling online video ”definitely not a substitute in any way” for television. She has some facts on her side: according to Nielsen Media Research, last year, the average household watched television 8 hours and 14 minutes a day, a 3-minute increase from the 2004-5 season and a record high.

But Howard Shimmel, a senior vice president at Nielsen, said research had shown something else: ”Internet homes, including broadband and dial-up, watch 9 percent less television over all than the general population. The impact by network differs, with some experiencing 25 percent lower ratings and others substantially unaffected.” (He added that wired homes were generally well-off, a population that watches television less as a matter of course.)

Anecdotally, I can say that our family ends up finding the remote less often. Tally up all the bereft fathers video-chatting with college-age daughters, bored teenagers making videos for other bored teenagers and geeks mashing up existing content to hilarious effect, and there is ferocious, idiosyncratic competition for consumers’ attention.

The threat isn’t new media displacing old media as much as personalization. Media has become something people make, forward, link and program. When we took the 2,000-mile road trip to drop the girls off at their respective campuses, we switched between my iPod and theirs rather than flip fruitlessly through radio channels that had been aggregated and formatted into musical sameness.

The internet offers a level of diversity not seen on regular TV or Radio. I especially like his comment: “Media has become something people make, forward, program.”