The Christmas thing really snuck up on me this time. I've been so busy I haven't been paying attention. I think part of it is that I don't have that much contact with surface culture any more. It's been ages since I've seen or heard any broadcast or "push" media, and that's kept me away from the mainstream advertising machine. Thank fox, I mean, lowest-common-denominator advertising and endless repeats of "seasonal" music are among the things that can turn the winter break into a nightmare (for some people).
Is anyone listening to FM anymore? Anyone watching broadcast TV?
Part of it is that I haven't had time to sit and explore whatever the mass culture has been brewing up lately, but another big part of it is a basic change in the way I've been consuming media (I can only talk about my own experience here because I really don't know what other people are doing). I realized today that my media consumption habits lately are almost completely "pull" focused rather than push.
I wake up and stream international news on the BBC feed. Not interested in broadcast, I'm pulling the information I want to me.
Then I bike to the train station and listen to podcasts on the morning commute, choosing to pull only the really specific content I'm interested in at that moment.
At work I might check Slashdot, Washington Post or the Onion a couple of times.
Evening commute I'm back to podcasting or listening to a chillout "after work" playlist on the iPod.
Then at night we'll usually watch a DVD or stream a documentary from the web. I might see or hear at most a handful of ads all day, and because those ads are attached to content that's geared towards a really specific audience (me, for whatever mood I'm in that moment), the ads are generally pretty tightly targeted on things I might actually be interested in.
It seems so strange to think that people just used to leave the TV on and be satisfied with whatever was getting pushed to them. It all seems to make so much more sense now. And because I haven't been saturated with insipid mainstream broadcast Christmas ads for the last month and a half, I can actually face this Christmas weekend without already feeling nauseous and violated.
So I guess that's good! Happy holidays indeed! Anyone else out there experiencing the same thing, or is it just me?
Anyway, if you do celebrate some kind of winter holiday this weekend, I hope it finds you all warm, happy, and fascinated.
Posted by case at December 24, 2005 12:57 PMHi Pete
That's nice. But canou be sure that all the info you don't get is not of your interest? I still use broadcast because I still may be interested in an story within a field that I'm not ususally interested in.
And working for a broadcast media, I feel uncomfortalbe not watching the main tv news at 21 hours. And as you know, I listen to the DR radio station P1 just about constantly. OK, I admit that sometimes it gets even toooo boring for me, but they have really good in depth political programmes that I would be sad to miss. I would be really happy the day when DR will also let Mac-people listen to their webradio, so I can hear all their programmes from our speakers at home whenever I want to - not only on my iPod or on FM.
But all the rest I agree with ;-)
Kiss,
Cecilie