Category: 
A few days after I posted this brief rant about television, I saw this Computerworld article, Survey: Internet on the verge of surpassing TV as ‘essential medium’. The article describes a survey done by Edison Media Research, that ranks changes in consumer perceptions about different types of media and how those perceptions have changed in the past five years. You can find the company’s press release and summary of the survey findings here.
Overall, the Internet is closing in on television as the essential source for information and entertainment. This certainly echoes my own experience; like the respondents to the survey, I’m much more likely to turn to the Internet first for news stories and information. For me, that is entertainment. And I’m certainly not surprised that others are finding a growing amount of information and pure entertainment all over the net.
If trends highlighted by the survey continue, the Internet will expand as not only an alternative to television, but as a challenge to it. Whether that challenge improves the quality of television programming, from news to “reality shows” to your favorite cop shows, is a huge unknown right now … but I do hope television executives are paying attention. I was a little surprised to see the survey result that respondents thought television quality had improved over the past five years; I wouldn’t have expected that result for the major networks at least, though I might have come to that conclusion about some of the more popular cable channels.
It would be fascinating, I think, if a survey of this type was conducted with a more detailed comparison of actual uses of the different types of media. A hierarchy seems to be emerging where television and the Internet are competing for the top spot, with radio trailing behind both in its own niche, and newspapers falling quite a bit behind. The newspaper, as many of us have grown up knowing it, is probably close to dead, though wrapping itself in technology may make it useful to us in different forms. Whether or not The New York Times or the Wall Street Journal present themselves as primarily digital content or on paper isn’t critical; their cultural role is the same regardless of the form they take. But they will need to adapt well to the new forms, or they’ll make themselves obsolete.
. I’m sorry to hear about plumbing problems at your house. I’m pretty sure that it is a quite distraction when you hope to be able to spend times on other interesting...