Why Television Is An Old Media Medium That Still Shines

New York Times:

And yet television stands out as the one old-media business with surprising resilience. Though we are spending a record amount of time online, including a record amount of time watching video, we are also watching record amounts of very old-fashioned television, according to Nielsen Media Research. Our attachment to the medium, of course, is obscured by the splintering of our attention across so many cable offerings, in addition to the major networks.

Read the whole story: New York Times

Comments

[maninabox]

Consistent, daily screen-reading transforms how we read. We read more and by skim and skip. What may (or may not) be lost is the facility for sustained, immersive reading. Print requires that we push our eyes across the page to get the reading to happen. There's an effort involved. A burden, even. In contrast, video requires much less work. We can't read when we are tired, but we can watch television.

Stross asserts that we've passed a tipping point: that screen media so dominates our daily lives that we are losing our inclination to access print.

TextTelevision is a New England new media startup that reshapes text to provide a new, more fluid, immersive, video-like reading experience on a screen. Here's Franklin Roosevelt's Inaugural Address in the worst of the Great Depression:

http://www.textflows.com/FDR_1933_speech

Still very timely today.

[digitalprophet]

Burn Notice is the only "show" I watch really... Daily Show and Colbert Report if I happen to have nothing to do.. I DVR Countdown w/ Olberman and watch it if I am in the mood.Otherwise I check out what History, Science, and Discovery channels have going on...

[Indie2008]

I love Burn Notice. I spend lots of time online, much of it business related, and still watch lots of TV. Best dramas are now on cable networks.

[kellygrrrl]

there is SOME surprisingly high quality entertainment on television ... not a lot, but some, which is fine with me.
Dexter, Mad Men, 30 Rock are intelligent and engaging. And I rarely miss Maddow, Olberman, Jon Stewart, Colbert, Bill Maher.
A little goes a long way, for me.

[Samalabear]

I'll ditto everything above plus a couple of others. BTW, I saw this commercial for Zulu last night. It was very, very funny. I'll have to read the article again later, because I'm still not sure what it's all about. But TV is, for the most part, a wasteland. As for movies, TCM is the only channel worth watching most of the time.