Friday is my favorite day of the week. Yes, it’s the start of the weekend, but it’s also the day that my guilty pleasure of a magazine, People, releases its new weekly issue. Each week, I pay $3.99 to look at the pictures and read the captions. Yet when I flip the last page, I pretty much have gotten the same gist of the stories as I would having read the issue cover to cover.
Granted, People magazine may not have the most compelling of all material enclosed, but in general, I have noticed that I tend to gravitate towards pictures, especially when taking in content online. I prefer You Tube to online stories and Picassa to status updates. Of course I still appreciate a good book or blog article and the words that flow together to create a captivating story, however, given the amount of content I am faced with each day, it seems like pictures really have become my preferred method of storytelling.
I found the article, Kids Consuming More Content (Research Brief), interesting, but kind of scary as well. I grew up reading, going to the movies, playing house and using my imagination/creativity to stay amused. My friends and I watched Saved by the Bell on tv after school, rather than Hannah Montana online by ourselves. Kids today (now I sound like my grandma), have so many options to stay entertained and consume content. The growth and development that goes along with reading, playing with friends, etc. seems like it is being compromised by the heavy auto-pilot consumption of online content.
Text as a currency is never going to go away. However, especially given the second nature usage of online video/photos at such a young age, I think that content distribution is going to shift to a more visual model. The challenge will be making sure that social media doesn’t become so overly consuming that it makes future generations less “social,” by negatively impacting the development which comes along with offline traditions such as reading and human interaction.
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While agree that the silo-ing of children watchin online content is not as interactive as gathering with friends around a TV show, I think that as online content becomes more interactive and social, interesting boundaries fade. Instead of limiting themselves to several close friends watchng something, potentially there could be any number of others from around the world taking part in the experience. Now, I still feel that face-to-face shared experiences are richer that virtual ones, it still is a level of sharing not possible before.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the comment, Jeff. I agree - there is definitely still a level of sharing taking place (which was not possible before). I'm definitely curious though to see if/how this will affect social skills/development in kids (positively or negatively). I guess when I have kids some day, I'll be able to do my own case study!
ReplyDeleteI guess that I have the same concern about the socialness of children and the impact of online content.
ReplyDeleteThough, I don't see a huge difference between the kids streaming Hannah Montana and you flipping through People. The fact is, magazines are not something kids "get," they are used to ingesting images through a computer screen and not a thin piece of paper. Your magazine habit comes from years of not getting your images through a computer.
Let's be honest - People is WAY better than Hannah Montana : )
ReplyDeleteI'm more of an US Weekly kind of a gal - but it's a great point you make about magazines. They are all pictures. I think you could take out the entire text of a magazine and still come away with the same understanding.
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