TheAgitator.com
What Media Consolidation Hath Wrought
Tuesday, April 20th, 2004Despite the hullabaloo over Rupert Murdoch, Ted Turner and the gang, we’ve got reams of information at our fingertips.
A few bullet points from Richard Saul Wurman’s new book Information Explosion that put today’s widespread availability of knowledge into perspective:
– A weekday edition of the New York Times contains more information than the average person was likely to come across in a lifetime in seventeenth-century England.– More new information has been produced in the last 30 years than in the previous 5,000. About 1,000 books are published internationally every day, and the total of all printed knowledge doubles every eight years.
– This is not to mention the relentlessly dramatic expansion of electronic information on the Internet, which is probably doubling the production of information every four years.
– In one year the average American will read or complete 3,000 notices and forms, read 100 newspapers and 36 magazines, watch 2,463 hours of television, listen to 730 hours of radio, buy 20 CDs, talk on the telephone almost 61 hours, read 3 books, and spend countless hours exchanging information in conversations.
Check Ben Compaine’s Reason cover piece from a while back for more debunking of the consolidation scare.
“Read 3 books…” that’s pretty lame, not that I’m much better.
What’s even lamer about the 3 books per year is 2,463 hours of TV. That’s almost 7 hours per day! It keeps coming back to this, but time is still our scarcest resource.
Yes, we have access to tons of information today, but not all information is equal. Bill Boner has an excellent discussion of this in Financial Reckoning Day, with relation to the tech boom.
Also, this is national TV Turnoff Week.
2463 hours of TV per year? If you hold a regular job, you work less than that. There isn’t even that much watchable content on TV, unless you watch just about everything, including re-runs, infomercials and consider it all to be ‘good’.
People like that should probably pour a little chlorine in their gene pool, me thinks.
but are we any wiser than before? not really.
6.75 hours per day
Imagine what the average American could learn if he devoted just half of his TV time to reading.
The AVERAGE American watches 6.75 hours of TV per day?
That can’t be right. I hope.
Some Media Stats
Here’s something else to add to your daily reading… Radley Balko posts about the sheer amount of information that is out there for the taking for us humans. Some of the statistics are astounding. While I would disagree somewhat that…
“Explosion” is right. Just keeping up with the chatter on blogs alone makes me feel like that guy in Scanners.
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