As a kind of followup to my previous post about how new media is attention, it’s worth looking at where that attention is going, and a recent survey by Ofcom (the media regulator) in Britain gives us a snapshot of that. As summarized by Staci over at PaidContent — a great example of new media if ever there was one — the survey looked at media consumption habits by what it calls Generation N (how did we get from Y all the way back to N?). A full version of the study in PDF format is here.
It’s no surprise that the N in Generation N stands for “networked,” since the network is where younger media consumers like to go (and not the television network, obviously). As the survey report (BBC news story here) puts it:
“There is also evidence of a significant difference in communications usage patterns between young adults and the general population: for example, 16-24 year olds spend on average 21 minutes more time online per week, send 42 more SMS text messages, but spend over seven hours less time watching television.”
According to the report, “share of viewing of terrestrial channels among 16–24 year olds is down from 74.3% of their viewing time in 2001 to 58% in 2005.” Over 70 per cent of that age group have used social networking or blogging sites such as MySpace, and over half of those surveyed used such sites at least once a week. A total of 37% of 18-24 year olds have posted material online (compared to 14% across all age groups), while close to one in five have their own website or blog.
