I imagine that anyone who attended OMMA Video in San Francisco on October 26th will agree: the panel of the day was what could best be described as a mini-focus group of 4 college students regarding their media behaviors. And the quote of the day came from cinema major Daniel. When asked what he watches on live TV, he responded with no sense of irony, “What is live TV?”
Cue the howling laughter.
The audience of media professionals roared in unison, supplemented with
shouts of “Well there’s your answer!” Daniel
1, Room Full of Professionals 0.
But as people immediately took to tweeting and re-tweeting
the quote (the tweets themselves projected on a giant screen at the front of
the room) it occurred to me that Daniel’s lack of understanding of the phrase
was not necessarily a function of his generation.
I decided to test this hypothesis with an experiment roughly
as scientific as projecting the opinion of one San Francisco film student to
the general populace of young millennials.
I took the same inquiry to my personal Facebook page.
“What does ‘live TV’ mean to you?” I posted to my status
update.
Immediately, the responses rolled in. Perhaps
reflective of the company I keep, the responses commenced on a sarcastic note. “The
TV has reached self-actualization,” joked one friend, while a local news
producer pal commented, “Paycheck.” Eventually
some serious responses made their way to the thread, and to my peer group of Gen
X and Boomer adults, here were their interpretations of “live TV”:
·
An event being covered in real time (the most
common response)
·
On the scene/breaking news coverage
·
Tweeting while you watch
Only one person loosely answered the question with a
definition that we the industry folk were getting at during the panel: “the
opposite of TiVo.” She happens to
work in the entertainment industry.
The truth of the matter is that we media professionals often
talk in industry jargon. To your average
audience member, “live TV” can connote a variety of things, none of them “TV
watched at the time it’s scheduled.” “What is live TV?” was a perfectly
reasonable question to ask. The necessity
of that inquiry was perhaps more rooted in our predilection for vague industry-speak
than it was in this student’s ignorance of scheduled TV grids.
Watch the panel here:
http://www.ustream.tv/recorded/18126423
Read some interesting research on media usage among entering college students, courtesy of Mr. Youth, here: http://www.slideshare.net/mediapostlive/1145-omma-video-nick-fuller
