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It is always interesting to see how people live and think - people, after all, make up the majority of our website visitors, customers and subscribers.
“That level of multiprocessing and interpersonal connectivity is now so commonplace that it’s easy to forget how quickly it came about. Fifteen years ago, most home computers weren’t even linked to the Internet. In 1990 the majority of adolescents responding to a survey done by Donald Roberts, a professor of communication at Stanford, said the one medium they couldn’t live without was a radio/CD player. How quaint. In a 2004 follow-up, the computer won hands down.”
Obvious, yes, but we do tend to forget how much has changed.
In truth, I hadn’t really thought of myself as being part of “the multitasking generation”, thinking I was stuck in the one that can’t even walk and chew gum at the same time. There’s also this fact that I live so far out into the wilds that it resembles the 19th Century outside, but here I am with about 15 tabs open in Firefox, reading and typing (often reading in Spanish while typing in English), while my email is downloading in the background. The coffee was made, cats were fed and the dog walked while the computer loaded.
The radio is on via the internet too - it is the only way I can get radio due to the nearby mountains - and I will often talk on the phone at the same time.
It is all highly convenient. What I love about working at home is the fact that I can set the computer to carry out some task, while I make the dinner, do the laundry, etc., or have those things and many others, including one ear on the TV for local news, happening in background while I work.
I know, this is the thin end of the wedge, but taking into consideration that I sure ain’t no kid (I stopped being one of those in the 1960’s) and I do live far away from the conventional “civilized world”, I think I serve as a decent “control” example that says, if I have been afflicted with this bug, then pretty much everyone you encounter will have a chronic case of it.
From the marketing point of view, reading this article from Time Magazine makes you realize things like why visitors spend so little time at your website or why subscribers pay scant attention to your carefully crafted and lovingly sent email offers. You wonder if they are capable of concentrating on one thing long enough to real long sales copy or digest a whole ebook, which, obviously, many marketers have realized with the increase in audio and video.
The answer to having too much media and too many tasks going on at once seems to be adding more attention grabbing media. Heaven knows where this will lead us, intellectually, but right now this is where we’re headed.
Sponzurz
