Up and Coming: The Internet Generation
Reading the web today I stumbled over two paragraphs in two different articles that basically say the same thing: The youngster are coming and they are endorsing the net. One article in wired is talking about the myspace.com phenomena of supporting unknown bands through a "friendster&orkut" type of service. The goal of this service is to encourage creativity in a global friend network. The websites generates more traffic then google at the moment and its indy bands are highly popular - some are selling up to half a million platters to its strong fanbase. Back on topic - inside the article there is the following paragraph:
And in the entertainment universe that MySpace is helping to create, friends count. "This generation is growing up without having ever watched programmed media," says Courtney Holt, head of new media and strategic marketing at Interscope, one of the first labels to embrace MySpace. "They don't think in terms of the album, and they don't think in terms of a TV schedule. They think in terms of TiVo, P2P, AOL, and of course MySpace. We're just going to have to adapt."
TV is out - who would have thought :P so is traditional channel music distribution and coming are the days of creative commons remixing free sharing and personal embracing your favorite band and really making an impact beyond feeding the ultra rich more money.
Now after reading this I stumbled across a "study" that more then half of all teens in the US (that is kids between 10 and 20 I guess) are considered content creaters. Now who is saying the net is NOT about participation - not only do the kids not sit in front of TV anymore they are also creatively engaged in human interaction and communication and all. Now a side slab to all the copyright supporters the study say the following (after shortly telling the world that the blog revolution is led by older teenage girls):
Teens continue to actively download music and video from the internet and have used multiple sources to get their files. Those who get music files online believe it is unrealistic to expect people to self-regulate and avoid free downloading and file-sharing altogether.
Yes and as we learned from the first paragraph - they doing cool things with their free as in beer downloaded unrestricted sound files and movies and the corpos should wake up and support them rather then sue them - otherwise they all will just stop buying chart music shit all together and rather go with the myspace.com bands.
So to put together the facts - 87% of all children (in the US) between 12 and 17 are using the internet - 57% are content creators and all that are using the net think its their main media consumption format - if that is not huge I do not know what is - that basically means the main target group for TV ads the late teens early twenties will just stop using the medium in less then three years. Combining this with the fact that print media has seen a 13% decline in the last 20 years while online print ad revenues are surging 25% in just one year everyone will start to acknowledge that we are surely at the tipping point of a societal transformation far greater then anything we had before. Accessible news, personal stories, pictures and videos from anyplace and anytime all with feedback re:feedback intermixed intervened no mass media opinion forming a global one mind - its the global individual that counts and popularity comes from expertise or artist qualification more then from media push hype - true opinions from all side come in unfiltered and highly opinionated.
Only sad thing that all this counts for the developed world with internet access. The most important thing is that ALL people alike should take part in this interpersonal communication.
One can dream.
He says and is greated with a german article on FAZ that basically says the same things - from a "professional" journalist point of view.