Is living room TV really back?
1.
The summaries of the article
The statistics from
regulator Ofcom suggest in the UK, television still dominates people’s media
habit. According to the report, people may spend seven hours a day watching TV.
In addition, there used
to be more TV set in the bedroom, but now the number has decreased. Therefore,
people get together in the living room in front TV again with a new multi-task habit.
This trend has been
contributed by the considerably increased ownership of the smartphone and
tablets. And instead of isolating each of the family members, the growth of
mobile devices has the opposite effects. Although half of the respondent have a
strong feeling of distraction when they do the multi-task simultaneously, there
are still many people choose to do it.
The multi-task habit
can be analyses from different points of view:
Gender
|
Female are more like to have the
multi-task habit
|
Age Group
|
Teens are more likely to use the mobile
message apps rather than SMS and they are less restraints and limits
|
Relationship
|
Parents more often let their children use tablet to entertain and
study
While they chose to watch some
other programme on the TV set
|
Content
|
Some of them use mobile devices to
share personal opinions and secret on the social net-work;
Some of them use these devices to take part in the programme during
watching;
|
2.
What are the issues? And what
is my reaction?
There are two main
issues I would like to discuss about:
a)
Is it really a ‘comeback’?
It is true that
people come back and sit together in the living room in front the TV. However
each of them is doing their own business. It is still a huge fragmentation and it
is more like a shared physical space even not a family get-together. Family
members are fragmented into the specialized groups by the mobile devices though
they are in the same room and watch the same programme. They do not share the
same media content. Their specialized interest makes them opt out of the public
sphere and imagined community. Therefore according to the multi-task habit, the
role of living room TV is actually different. In the past it is an essential
way of facilitating the family activities and public sphere. And now it has
almost lost its function.
On the other hand,
some may argue that there might be more interaction with the programme like the
in-show message of Question Time. People use devices to share their opinion
while watching. And it will improve the public sphere. However, this is not the
TV’s function.
All in all, I believe
there might be no real ‘comeback’ for living room TV based on Ofcom’s research
and data.
b)
What has multi-task done to our
brain?
To understand why we
always fall in it the habit of multitasking, when we know we shouldn’t. In fact
the answer is quite simple:
People who multitask are not being more productive-they just feel
more emotionally satisfied from their work (Zhen Wang)
Zhen Wang is a
researcher for multitasking and she is the lead author of the study and assistant professor of communication at Ohio State University.She mentioned that if we study with our books
open, watch TV at the same time and text friends every so often, we get a great
feeling of fulfillment and we feel incredibly efficient.
However, much
research has shown again and again that the human mind isn’t meant to
multitask. Even worse, research shows that multitasking can have long-term
harmful influence on our brain function. In addition, Clifford Nass, a
researcher at Stanford assumed that people who multitask a lot are in fact a
lot worse at filtering irrelevant information and also perform significant
worse at switching between tasks, compared to singletaskers.
In 2010, a study by
neuroscientist at the French medical research agency suggests a two-task limit
on what the human brain can handle. Taking on more task increase the like hood
of errors, so they suggest ’20 minutes rule’. Instead of switching task from
minute to minute, dedicate a 20-minute chunk of time to a single task, and then
switch to the next one.
To sum up,
multi-tasking habit may hurt our brain and this is also the reason why people
will feel distracted. It is exemplified and analyzed that, from the biology and
medical science point of view multi-tasking has the opposite influence on the information
receiving.
3.
Anything I read link to this?
http://business.time.com/2013/04/17/dont-multitask-your-brain-will-thank-you/http://lifehacker.com/5922453/what-multitasking-does-to-our-brains
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2516990/Sorry-chaps-brains-arent-multi-tasking-But-women-hard-wired-juggle-jobs.html
http://venturebeat.com/2012/01/09/how-we-watch-tv-now-viewers-are-going-mobile-and-multi-tasking/
http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/multitask.htm
Thank you Elise~~
ReplyDeleteActually, after reading such a news, I really doubt that whether the living room TV would come back or not.
First, I agree with Elise, that the function of TV has already changed nowadays. When I was a little girl, I stay at home with my families after school, watching programs, sharing opinions about the TV news, it’s a habit of my daily life. However nowadays, I prefer to use my tablets to surf on the internet rather than watch TV. One of the reasons was that almost every programmes we saw on TV can be found on the internet, besides , communicate within internet were easier and quicker. Although some classical programs still exist and play an important role of public sphere, they also changed the way of broadcasting.( For example, they can be broadcasted on the internet instead of only broadcasting on TV). To sum up ,the fragment still increasing , it lead to the impossibility of living room TV’s come back.
However, I thought that the living room TV would not be replaced by other technical devices. As the research claimed, the TV might be more essential and necessary for the old generation, so that might be the other reason why we still keeping that kind of screen at home. I can hardly imagine what my grandfather’s life will be without TV and newspaper. Haha~~^-^
Actually , every device has their own role of media and people’s life, it is changeable, may not be dominant anymore, but they still cannot be replaced anyway.
Thanks Elise,
ReplyDeleteI would agree with you that a TV comeback would be impossible as more and more other portable entertaining devices come along to create such an fragmented viewer's content.
You can find almost every programmes shown on TV on elsewhere of the Internet and access immediately without any hesitation to switch channels and bothering your parents.
I’m fascinated by how our technological developments reflect our culture’s desire to perform more and more tasks at once. Communication researchers have recently found that we multitask with media not because it helps us get things done, but perhaps because we think we are getting things done. It feels good to multitask. So it’s not surprising that we would crave technologies that will help us multitask, right?
Google Glass to be an obvious example of the most recent addition to a long list of technologies that have been developed to help people multitask. And to be honest, Google Glass takes this concept of multitasking aid to an entirely new level. The frames have the ability to insert a digital screen in our field of vision, but because that screen is confined to a small corner in this field, our eyes are still free to wander while we perform different tasks, right?
But when Google Glass comes along, socia media inherits its convenience and may make family relationship get worse. Just imagine, members in families who always being plugged into these technologies may create barriers to developing relationships with each other. At one time or another, many of us may have found ourselves sharing a meal with friends or family and finding that each person’s focus is on a cell phone or tablet device or a Google glass. Although we are technically together, sharing the same physical space, mentally we are somewhere else.
Personally, I think we need to be aware of our own limitations and be vigilant to remain conscious of how our use of it affects us and those around us.