Kids as Oracles
Fred Wilson has a great post titled What My Kids Tell Me About the Future of Media in which he evaluates the current and future state of media based on the consumption habits of his kids. Here's an excerpt:
1) When they walk into a DVD store, they rarely walk out with a movie. It’s almost always the first season of a TV show they’ve heard is good. They’ll go see a movie in the theater but don’t really enjoy watching movies at home or on their computers. They feel that TV shows are better written and more interesting. And the entertainment value is certainly more compelling. For roughly $40US, they got something like 25 episodes of Brothers and Sisters...
2) They will play games whenever given the opportunity. My oldest, Jessica, favors brick breaker on her blackberry and admits to be close to addicted. She claims to know kids who play it under the desk at school...
4) The only time they listen to radio is when we have it on in the car for short rides. If it’s a long ride, we almost always plug in the iPod and they’ll take turns DJ’ing...
5) They still read books the way we did as kids. That doesn’t seem to have changed a bit...
6) They love magazines and read all the fashion, cooking, and gossip magazines they can get their hands on. They read about the same topics online and on TV (particularly food), but they show no signs of moving away from the magazine. In fact, I detect a growing obsession with magazines among my family. They literally fight over a new issue the day it arrives.
7) They don’t seem particularly interested in newspapers. They get most of their news on the Internet. Josh will read the sports pages over breakfast and the girls will glance at the front page. Important current events and politics will sometimes generate enough interest that they’ll read the front page portion of a story and then launch into a discussion over breakfast. But I don’t see a commitment to newspapers like we have in my generation and my parents generation.
If you're interested in the future of media I'd definitely read the rest of his post. I'd say that my kids' habits closely mirror his, and I've been struck by how my kids also enjoy books and magazines but only look at the newspaper when they have to cut out an article for a current events project at school.
One thing that is intriguing to me is how much more fun my oldest finds gaming when it's done online against lots of different players. He'll still play games offline if that's his only choice, but he gets really charged up for the XBox Live games and it almost doesn't matter which game it is. And the thought that there are millions of kids (and adults) like him out there truly boggles my mind. I think that's a truly game-changing, culture-shifting phenomenon.
How the kids watch TV is also interesting. If they're
worn from a long week of school they might veg out for a couple of
hours in front of the tube, but really they just watch it in short
bursts and then head to the computer to fiddle around online, or read a
magazine or read a book. They aren't as likely to passively watch TV
as we were growing up back in the 70s and 80s, probably because they
have more choices but also I think because that they get interaction
when they go online. Actually going outside and interacting with other
kids at quaint pastimes like, oh, football or basketball is another
story entirely.
As for music, in our house the kids seem to find their music via word of mouth, whether it's online or offline. I know this because I have a Rhapsody account set up and they have to come to me to purchase songs to download to their MP3 players. When I ask them where they find the songs the answer is always "It was on some friends MySpace" or "So and so told me about it at school" or "my best friend let me listen to it on her iPod on the bus". In my day we found most of our music from listening to the radio in addition to recommendations from friends and being bombarded with someone else's music selections bellowing out of his boombox. Also, if you wanted just one song from an artist you had to buy the album or get a friend to tape a song off of their album (and later CD) for you. Now with services like Rhapsody the kids mix and match what they want: one Black Eyed Peas tune, a couple of Fergie tracks, etc. I think they'd fall over if they had to spend $15 to buy a CD that has just three songs they like. For that matter I'm right there with them.
I'd say it behooves all of us to watch how our kids operate because in a few years the media companies are going to change how they deliver their wares to meet those habits and we'll be following their lead.
