greenpoint design

Social Media Defined

Couldn’t resist this concise commentary on recent social media developments by DespairWear. Naturally, the format for this missive is a T-shirt.

Anti-social media

Analog Television Ends and No One Notices

After much delay, America finally switched from analog to digital television June 12 — and hardly anyone noticed.

Most Americans already subscribe to satellite or cable TV, which is transmitted digitally. Fewer than 15 percent of viewers got their television broadcast over the air in an analog signal. Nevertheless, television stations staffed up phone banks, anticipating a flood of calls after the switch, but received barely a trickle, the New York Times reported.

According to the The Nielsen Company,  99 percent of American households own a television and the average American watches more than 4 hours of TV each day. Although, The Neilsen Company (formerly A.C. Neilsen Co.) still makes most of its money monitoring television and may have a slightly skewed vision of what Americans are doing with all those screens.

In 2004, a Pew Research study noted a shift away from television news toward the net.  Later an IBM study from 2007 found that internet usage was about equal to the time spent viewing TV.  Furthermore, Ofcom’s 2008 study of British media found that while most households had the telly on, few were paying attention (Ofcom is the British Office of Communications, similar to the American FCC). The Ofcom study found that two in five consumers use their mobile phones while watching television, and the same proportion watch the TV while surfing the web.

The cessation of analog transmission in the US marks the end of an era. It also delineates the beginning of a new chapter in communications — when “television” became just another node on the net.

TV is Over