The Screen Is Tiny, but ... comment

Comments on this blog aren't real visible unless you're coming directly to the post from "outside."  So every once in awhile someone posts a comment that I think should be "graduated" so email and RSS subscribers can see it.  This one, to Sunday's The Screen Is Tiny, but the Plans Are Big is from reader John Proffitt at KAKM in Anchorage:

As a Gen Xer myself, working in a public broadcasting entity, I can FEEL this graph every day.

I definitely feel like cell, TV and PC are closely related and just about equally important (each has its advantages and disadvantages).

I also can feel our TV (PBS) market is way, way older than me. We still run Lawrence Welk, for God's sake! And when we do TV pledge, a piddling amount of pledge comes in via the web. Radio does at least 30% online, and sometimes up at 50%. Clearly radio is younger.

Similarly, I'm the youngest manager in the company (if late 30's is young anymore) and I'm the only one with several key new technologies at home. Until this past winter, I was also the only manager with an iPod (or other portable media player).

Here are the two billion dollar questions, though...

[1] As time passes and each generation moves from the left side of the graph to the right side, will their media preferences shift with them in the same proportions? In other words, when I get to be 60 years old, will the PC still be the most important device, or will the TV take over my top preference by then?

[2] In what ways will the media / device landscape change in the next 30 years? Will some variant of IPTV come along? Will TV programming as we know it disappear, to be replaced with something new? Just how pervasive will on-demand digital media be by then?

As those of us on the leading edge of the baby boom sadly know, time marches on in accelerating fashion from where you are and 60 will be here before you know it.  --Dennis

Comments

[Mark Laskowski]

Regarding John Proffitt's first of two billion dollar questions (i.e. [1] As time passes and each generation moves from the left side of the graph to the right side, will their media preferences shift with them in the same proportions? In other words, when I get to be 60 years old, will the PC still be the most important device, or will the TV take over my top preference by then?)

In my humble opinion, the answer is no. After reading Strauss and Howe's Generations and many other bits of research about how as the baby boomer generation becomes older they do not begin to behave like the G.I. generation, it seems more reasonable to expect that attitudes about and use of technology will defined more by the generational cohort one belongs to than by the age one has reached or is reaching . . . and this is even accelerated by technology becoming so scarce that it becomes inconvenient for the consumer to access it (I still have my albums, but I don't listen to them anymore because I'm not even sure where my turntable is).