The penultimate section of the July 2009 Cites & Insights is Trends & Quick Takes--another "occasional" feature, this one for little thoughts that are more substantive than the foolishness in My Back Pages but not substantive enough for their own essays.
Realistically, most pieces of this section would work nicely as blog posts--and there is some crossover.
When this section appears, it's usually longer than this time around and usually includes a section of "Quicker Takes," each a single paragraph. This one has a trio of items, each triggered by something I saw elsewhere:
- A note on the dispiriting idea that, as soon as Happy Days Are Here Again, we'll go right back to overspending and mortgaging ourselves beyond the hilt--and some related notes on "finding the work you'll love."
- A note on the clarity with which Fortune portrays relations between business and the current government (Them vs. Us), at least in some articles--and the relationship between such stark oppositions and open access (remember PRISM?).
- A little note on the apparent belief of some journalists that "we" have plentiful bandwidth, plentiful enough to handle high-definition TV, and are ready to jump entirely to TV-over-internet. Hey, I'm delighted that, at my new house, I get something over 2Mbps actual download bandwidth--it's an improvement from my old house. (Not in the item: Current measures show that, in the U.S. at least, 99% of all video is viewed...on the TV,
using traditional over-the-air/cable/satellite sourcesnot on PCs and smart phones.)
Want the section by itself, in mediocre HTML? Here.
I screwed up on the original post (text not in the article itself): That 99% of viewing, on TVs, includes DVDs, DVR recordings, etc., as well as broadcast/cable/satellite. As for YouTube--well, people watch lots of usually-brief *videos*--but the total hours spent viewing pales in comparison to the time the TV is on in most households.
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Where are you getting the 99% number? I don't believe it. DVD alone is way more than 1% of video watching. There is a reason Google is losing $500M this year on youtube and spends about $1,000,000 a day for bandwidth, people watch them. Personally I watch about as much sports online as I do off and that is by far the most live TV I watch now. The Masters golf tournament had great online TV this year. All the rest you say is more than true of course.
Markk: I get the 99% number from Nielsen's latest studies (as in this ''Ars Technica'' report--but you're right, I added an erroneous qualifier. That 99% (98.8%) is video viewed on a television, and certainly includes DVD, DVR, videocassettes, etc. I've fixed the post--and thanks for noting the error. (It's a mistake I shouldn't have made: During the summer, at least, we watch a whole lot more video from DVD than from cable.)