Mass Media Disconnect

[from nataliedee.com]

In the past year, I’ve noticed that I have become increasingly less aware of what new movies have come out, even the supposedly good ones that win awards. And I think what I am experiencing is a disconnect with mass marketing channels which primarily try to catch our attention through television commercials and now even through pre-showing commercials in movie theaters (I hate those).

This first started after we got our Tivo a few years back and we got in the habit of skipping through commercials. It got to a point where I didn’t even know what the new shows were on the tube, and had to hear about it through friends or via online news feeds. It seems kind of ironic that by taking control of what I am watching, I became disconnected with knowing what was actually available.

In trying to find an image to visualize this post, I came across this diagram from Ogilvy (a big advertising company, go figure, I guess I’m not the only one thinking about this) talking about “Personal Circuits”:

The way that we consume media has changed significantly from the time where we were all glued in front of the television set, to the present where we have all these different “personal circuits” from which to be fed with music, videos, pictures, etc. I guess it shouldn’t be all that much of a surprise that I feel out of the mainstream, when the mainstream itself is splintering into multiple channels.

I can see how this disconnect is going to become greater until mass media companies figure out how to breakdown their messages into meaningful channels that people want to watch. Especially now that I am barely even using Tivo, now that most shows can be downloaded. And who wants to go to movie theaters nowadays with all those commercials taking up the first 30 minutes and the hassle of it all. Then again, maybe media really does want to be free and we don’t have to rely on the big media companies to tell us what to watch.

Until this all gets sorted out, or some new way of aggregating, sorting and identifying media that I am personally interested in comes along, I’ll just have to keep my eyes and ears open for those stray pieces that catch my interest.