A little gem from
the IEEE talking about a
a study from UCSD's Global Information Industry Center (GIIC) :
"computers have had major effects on some aspects of information consumption. In the past, information consumption was overwhelmingly passive, with telephone being the only interactive medium. Thanks to computers, a full third of words and more than half of bytes are now received interactively. Reading, which was in decline due to the growth of television, tripled from 1980 to 2008, because it is the overwhelmingly preferred way to receive words on the Internet."
Must warm the hearts of the newspaper people everywhere. No, wait..............it says:
Conventional print media has fallen from 26 percent of INFO [they define INFO as reading, listening etc] in 1960 to 9 percent in 2008. However, this has been more than counterbalanced by the rise of the Internet and local computer programs, which now provide 27 percent of INFO. Conventional print provides an additional 9 percent. In other words, reading as a percentage of our information consumption has increased in the last 50 years, if we use words themselves as the unit of measurement.
But if TV is chortling at the Schadenfreude, beware - they back up our findings of last year:
Two nascent developments might also cause significant dislocations: mobile television and video over the Internet. So far, mobile TV has low utilization and is very much a niche product. On the other hand, video by Internet is quite widespread, but as a complement rather than a substitute for conventional TV program delivery mechanisms. YouTube and its cousins have made a huge variety of novel and specialized video material available to anyone with a mediocre broadband connection.
.......
If and when a substantial number of Americans are able to receive streaming video at sustained speeds of roughly 10 megabits per second and low latency, it may dramatically alter the way they receive video. Internet-based television, rather than being reserved for material where low quality is compensated for by a very wide selection (the “long tail effect”) might become common for mainstream programming as well.
So there - and I'll bet when that happens reading will plummet again. But the most fascinating bit I saw - playing back to my posts on Innovation in 1909 being
better than today and the
limits to digital media vs analog, is this:
if we include “personal conversation” as a source of information, it is possible that we receive fewer bytes of INFO than our ancestors did 100 years ago. The reason is that conversation is very “high bandwidth.” A full fidelity video link between two locations, including stereo vision and sound is not possible with present technology – the observer will realize they are not physically in the location. If we could do it, however, it would require conservatively 100 million bits per second. Three hours of personal conversation a day at this bandwidth would be 135 gigabytes of INFO, about four times the average daily consumption today.
In other words we still do not have the carrying capacity of f2f, even on the best p2p networks, nad aren't likely to for a while. Maybe the best role for Social Media going forward is to allow us to socialise with real people then?
