With podcasting and video-on-demand, you and I decide what we want to watch/hear, and when. The content providers' tape archives, as it were, are available to us in their entirety whenever we want over broadband.
One of the points that I made back in May while speaking at the Calgary Linuxfest was that listening to citizen media is challenging. I don't mean that in some altruistic save-the-world type of way. Rather, I mean that it's challenging to listen to. One of the reasons why this is so is for the exact reason that Martin brings up.
To date, we've had our media fed to us. Even those of us with the full satellite TV package only have to choose from several hundreds of programs each hour. With citizen media like podcasts which are available all the time, we are faced with the choice of literally tens of thousands of possible shows at any given time (audio file, no minute hack - sorry)
Are we up to that challenge? Never before has the average Joe or Jane had to bring such well built critical-thinking skills to the table in order to do something so mundane as picking what to watch for the next 30 minutes. There's never been a reason to develop these skills before which is why that vast majority of people not only fail to find good citizen-generated content, but also why most people just can't be bothered to even try.
In the unlikely event that the MSM (main stream media) houses heed Martin's cry and put their entire archives online, how will that help? It would only increase the volume of shows to pick from. That's not going to be a problem, however, because those archives are worth money and until MSM figures out how to monetize an archived show, it's not likely to appear online anywhere in the near future.
Can we stand much more to search through?
Many thanks! I'm no fan of long TV watching sessions or channel surfing.
Posted by: Martin Rundkvist | October 9, 2006 1:35 PM | Permalink to Comment