A Record Quarter for Television

The New York Times is reporting today on the persistence of television watching despite the collapse of other forms of what they are calling 'old-media'. I'm not sure if anyone else feels this way, but personally I've gotta say that I find the description of any means of communication and entertainment that is not somehow connected to the Internet as 'old-media' gives me a bit of vertigo!

Apparently, according to Nielson, in the quarter that ended September 30th, 2008, Americans watched an average of 142 hours per month, up 5 hours from the previous year. And that's the summer, too! Meanwhile over the same period Internet use averaged out at 27 hours monthly, up an hour and a half from the previous year.

And why are we so "smitten with screens"? Apparently it is because print takes too much thinking, and "because the text mode is now used so infrequently that it can feel like a burden". Instead apparently the population is leaning more and more over to video - even on the primarily text-based Internet people are tending more and more to prefer their content in the form of moving images such as provided by YouTube. This is why, then, according to the article, newspapers and publishing houses are suffering (as old-media companies) but television is not. It remains an easily accessibly 'immersive experience'. And this is apparently what we want, not to visit our media with a polite objective eye, but rather to bathe in it.