It is so sad. Young people don’t read newspapers anymore. They don’t watch the television news and they don’t consult news websites. The end of culture and democracy must be near. Or… maybe not at all.
The despair about the new generations is the despair of educators, marketing people and newspaper publishers. This despair is very understandable, and I think the observations are to a large extent reflecting a behavior shift. But, there are also opportunities, for publishers, for markting, for culture and for democracy – that is what I hope.
In order to explain why I see great opportunities, I will briefly write about four documents I did read and watch these last days. Three of those documents had something to do with a previous post on MixedRealities, Exodus to the Augmented Reality.
In that post I commented on a conference in Brussels, organized by the Financial Times, highlighting the importance of mobile internet access which will eventually lead to an augmented reality.
In the meantime one of the most interesting participants, Antti Öhrling of the UK company Blyk, posted his observations about the conference. He mentioned Geraldine Wilson of Yahoo! Europe
who predicted that by 2016, more users will access the internet from their mobile devices than the fixed PC. Geraldine observed that there are approximately a billion PCs and three billion mobiles and said take up will be more rapid in emerging markets, where people do not have PCs, and mobile is the only way that they can access the internet.
Another important element was a report by Opera on the importance of social networks for the mobile web. What Blyk itself demonstrates through its marketing approach is how important it is to be rich in relevance, engagement and user experience - important for the mobile web, but of course also for, well, just the web whether it is mobile or not.
On my post about augmented reality and the mobile internet I also got a very kind and very insightful reaction by Prokofy Neva on Second Thoughts. She does not speak about “augmented reality” but about “mediated reality”:
I would call it “mediated reality”. That has a double media — one is very literal, that it is reality not “as it is” but mediated to you, coming to you in the form of voice, pictures, text. But it also speaks to the immersiveness of that media consumption — you are mediated, like you are medicated.
This is a very rich comment indeed, and philosophically very relevant. It has to do with “reality” – what do we mean using that word, as in “virtual reality” as opposed with “real life” for instance, or in “augmented reality”. For those inclined to explore the philosophical aspects, as always there is Wikipedia as a starting point. Also the wordplay “mediated – medicated” offers philosophical possibilities, presenting the media as a potion, which can have beneficial but also possibly intoxicating effects. I hope to develop this in a future post.
She continued:
The phones, especially as they get cheaper, will be how a lot of people take the Internet and fold it into reality and thus make reality the 3-D Internet, not some…other 3-D Internet thingie.
Prokofy contrasts this with the vision of founder Philip Rosedale of Linden Lab who “thought that the 3-D web would remain a static if flexible sort of thing accessible by you sitting down in a chair and still clicking to access a box.”
I also got a reaction by John Wallace, who is exploring Augmented Reality and made a collection of YouTube links concerning AR. Fascinating stuff, I will show just one which I particularly liked:
Finally, I would like to mention a recent BusinessWeek article, Beyond Blogs. In this article Stephen Baker and Heather Green highlight what changed since they had a cover story three years ago about the blogging phenomenon. One of the insights they bring is that according to a recent study from Forrester Research, only a quarter of the U.S. adult online population even bothers to read a blog once a month. Stephen and Heather explain:
But blogs, it turns out, are just one of the do-it-yourself tools to emerge on the Internet. Vast social networks such as Facebook and MySpace offer people new ways to meet and exchange information. Sites like LinkedIn help millions forge important work relationships and alliances. New applications pop up every week. While only a small slice of the population wants to blog, a far larger swath of humanity is eager to make friends and contacts, to exchange pictures and music, to share activities and ideas.
Back to the sadness about those young people who don’t like to read newspapers or watch the television news. Everything I read and see, or at least an important thread I see in the above mentioned documents, seems to indicate young people do want to consume anywhere and anytime, and they want to share and exchange, to engage and to produce anywhere and anytime.
I remember from my leftist youth how intellectuals where hoping for the day when audiences would no longer consume passively – cfr. also the Theatre of Cruelty by Antonin Artaud. As Wikipedia explains:
The Theatre of Cruelty aimed to hurl the spectator into the centre of the action, forcing them to engage with the performance on an instinctive level. For Artaud, this was a cruel, yet necessary act upon the spectator designed to shock them out of their complacency.
This is where we are getting now. Kids, youth, and many “older people” prefer to engage, to interact, to share and produce. Maybe not only the old models of marketing are no longer working that well, maybe the same applies for news coverage and education. Maybe we should consider other ways to bring our educational and news stories, contrasting with the classical linear narratives – for instance by experimenting with non-linear strategies like one can find in gaming, user generated virtual worlds, art performances. This is the challenge, and the opportunity, of the shift of behavior of those who were previously known as “the audience”, “the consumers” and “the students”.
Roland Legrand