Media & Culture

Digital Media / Media & Culture — No Comments
30
Sep 09

Three Screens – Moving Content Consumption Across Platforms

I can’t speak for everyone, but I know how much my television viewing habits have changed over the last few years. Between the DVR, Hulu, and my Apple TV, my routine has changed drastically from just five years ago.

For one thing, I watch more. It seems fairly simple, but with better access to view the shows I want, when I want, I watch more. True, I pretty much only watch recorded programs, and pretty much always fast forward through the commercials, but I most certainly watch a lot more than I used to.

So, the most recent research from Nielsen’s Three Screen report shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone – video viewing is up. According to their research, overall viewing is up by 1.5% over the same quarter last year, including, as you’d expect, an increase in internet video viewing.

More interesting is the data on simultaneous TV viewing and internet usage, which is at 56.9%. Quite a large number, but certainly not a surprise to me. I can think of a zillion times I’ve been in the middle of watching a show and felt the immediate need to look up an actor on IMDB, or Wikipedia.

These patterns are just glimpses into the future as media consumption continues to change. These changes will result in increased consumption, not decreased, but with better control and more choice. Hopefully quality won’t suffer in the meantime. But it’s time that programmers got smarter about how to bring the three screens together during programming. It’s time we moved beyond SMS voting campaigns…

Media & Culture — No Comments
27
Jul 09

On Tropes and tropes

A conversation last night about post-structuralism and tropes got me thinking quite a bit about how tropes, both in the sense of the word as it applies in normal context to figures of speech – such as metaphor, allegory, synecdoche, etc – and in the more specific and technical form of trope theory as applied to such things as metaphysics and epistemology, realism, nominalism, and such.

Tropes are an important tool in understanding how to connect disparate views that span across cultures and forms, and can be a powerful tool in helping authors create stories. Hollywood has longed use various “devices” to push plots and develop characters. But how have major tropes in modern culture changed over the course of the last decade? Have technologies such as Twitter or Facebook had an impact on generalized cultural tropes that span across groups, whether they be of the same gender, age, race? Are there tropes that can be seen as being more universal (and “universal” in this context is not meant in the metaphysical or nominal sense)?And how many second-order signs are media and technology companies creating to drive people into patterns of conspicuous consumption?

It’s very interesting to think about the ability of the digital bourgeois to use powerful tropes to create second-order signs for the specific purpose to getting people to consume their content or purchase their goods in the ways they want. Apple is notoriously successful at this – the fact that most people believe that Apple computers are the computers for creative people, therefore creating the fallacy that by owning your own Apple computer will make you more creative and allow you to “Think Different”.

What tropes have been created by marketers specifically to improve their sales, and what tropes have been born out of a more grass roots process of transference of memes? I’m sure this will keep me awake for many nights to come…

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