Re: You Know It's Over for the Nets When...
- From: "Rhino" <no.offline.contact.please@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 17 May 2006 10:05:44 -0400
"WQ" <wq@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1147821789.040679.245970@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
...only one in four 12-34-year-olds can name the Big 4 networks.
Either people are that clued out or they've become that dumb.
From www.adage.com:
Study: Only One in Four Teens Can Name Broadcast Networks
TV Viewing Fourth Most-Popular Activity, Behind Web, Friends, Movies
By Abbey Klaassen
Published: May 15, 2006
NEW YORK (AdAge.com) -- For the week of the broadcast network upfront
presentations, Bolt Media hopes this stat delivers a bullet to TV: Only
one in four 12- to 34-year-olds can name all four major broadcast
networks: ABC, NBC, CBS and Fox.
Teens may not be able to name the big four, but they know MTV, Cartoon
Network and Comedy Central.
The finding comes via an online poll conducted by Bolt Media, a
10-year-old Web site that six weeks ago relaunched itself as a place
for users to upload videos and photos. About 400 members responded to
the questions, including one that asked how respondents spent their
free time.
The most popular activity? That would be surfing the Internet, which
84% said they did during their idle periods. Hanging out with friends
came in second at 76%, watching movies third at 71% and TV viewing
fourth at 69%. The five most-watched TV networks were Fox, Comedy
Central, ABC, MTV and Cartoon Network.
"There's a massive movement going on in people under 30 and how they
spend their media time," said Bolt President Lou Kerner, who once upon
a time was a cable analyst on Wall Street before leaving to run TV.com
and then Bolt. "Our audience spends lots of time on net, creating their
own media."
He shrugs off the idea that the poll, because it was based on Bolt
members who tend to be heavy online users, wasn't of value. He charges
the results are representative of teens who go on sites like Bolt or
YouTube -- exactly the kinds of rabid media consumers sophisticated
marketers are interested in reaching.
"We're finally at an inflection point where advertisers are tired of
spending more and more and getting less and less, particularly as it
relates to youth," he said. "You're going to see a much broader
embracement of the Internet as a distribution mechanism to get their
shows out there."
He criticized NBC's decision to pull the "Saturday Night Live" "Lazy
Sunday" clip off of YouTube and praised Fox for its viral marketing of
"Family Guy," which went on to be a cash cow in DVD sales. Mr. Kerner's
advice to the networks as they look to build buzz for the new fall
season?
"Take your clips and put them out there on these different sites. Let
the kids take the codes and put them into their social media profiles
so they can show their friends and their friends can collect that as
well," he said. "That viral marketing is best possible thing they can
do to drive more people to the broadcast channel or their own dot-com
site."
I think you're only seeing the shadow of the tip of the iceberg with this
observation.
A few years ago, a group of high school seniors in South Texas were asked
what country is immediately south of Texas. Answers included Guatemala,
Brazil and FRANCE! (I assume a few of them got the right answer, Mexico,
but I'm not positive.) I saw that little gem in a Time or Newsweek in the
dentist's office.
On Monday, I caught a few minutes of an American game show where they
asked three different people some pretty easy questions. The people were a
girl who was a recent high school graduate, a guy who had graduated 10 or
15 years ago, and a woman who probably graduated 30 years ago. They got a
lot of the answers wrong.
When asked the name of a rock group where the musicians had the first
names John, Paul, George, and Ringo, one of the contestants didn't know
and the other guessed The Village People.
When asked the name of any one of the three ships that accompanied
Columbus on his first trip to the New World, the recent high school
graduate said "Titanic". The correct answers, of course, are the Nina, the
Pinta, and the Santa Maria.
When asked what two things are required to cause a rainbow, one of the
contestants thought and thought and finally came up with
"Moisture.............. and Rain!". I don't know if she thought that there
is a special kind of rain that has no moisture in it or if she just lacked a
basic understanding of what moisture is. The correct answer, of course, is
rain and sunlight.
I still remember a Jay Leno segment where he asked people where the
International Space Station was situated; he even made a point of
deliberately gazing up at the sky to give them a hint. I still remember
one person guessing "Houston?".
Last year, I remember one thread in a history newsgroup where someone
posted to say that a teacher had told them that the Japanese had attacked
Pearl Harbor because they were upset about the internment of
Japanese-Americans. He was writing to ask why the Japanese had been
interned in the first place. Not only the student but the teacher appeared
to be oblivious to the fact that the teacher had inverted cause and
effect; they didn't realize that the internment of Japanese-Americans
happened as a RESULT of Pearl Harbor.
Theodore Dalrymple, the British social commentator, had thousands of
patients during his career as psychiatrist, and often asked new patients a
few general knowledge questions to assess their educational achievements.
He'd ask things like "What is 9 times 7?" or "When was World War II for
Britain?". Among the adults he asked, and considering only people who'd had
their education entirely in Britain where people can't leave school until at
least 15, very few of his patients
could answer the first question correctly. Answers to the second
question ranged from 1918 to 1960. Again, very few people got the right
answer, 1939 to 1945.
When his father died, Dalrymple found a pile of his father's old
schoolbooks. His father had been a working class kid from a
rough-and-tumble part of London but he'd always spoken fondly of the
high-quality education he'd gotten in a regular working-class school.
Dalrymple went through the textbooks and was astonished at how difficult
the material was compared to what he had remembered from his own education
a generation later. He felt that today's students would be completely
unable to do the same work; in fact, he strongly doubted whether most of
today's TEACHERS could do that work!
I spoke to one senior citizen who'd been educated in Europe but only got
as far as Grade 8 because that was as far as school went for all but the
very rich in her day. I discovered that she'd done problems like "A train
leaves Paris at 7 AM going south at 80 km/hour and another train leaves
Marseilles going north at 60 km/hour. When and where do they meet?" I'm
certain I didn't do that sort of problem until well into high school. I
wonder if today's kids see problems like that before University?
I don't know what they've been teaching in the schools since I left but I
think the general trend has been in favour of bolstering students'
self-esteem and de-emphasizing knowledge of important facts.
I saw a documentary a few years ago in which they asked young people
around the ages of 10 to 12 what person in the world they admired the
most. They spoke to kids in remote African villages, cities in India,
towns in the Far East, and all sorts of other places. I was astonished at
the answers they gave to the question. One boy cited his father and a
couple of kids cited famous historical figures like Martin Luther King Jr.
or Gandhi
but more than half of them cited Madonna! (The pop singer not the
religious figure.) I hadn't imagined that people in distant third world
countries would even have heard about Madonna but pop music seems to be far
more pervasive than knowledge of basic arithmetic or history.
--
Rhino
.
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