Don’t get ahead of the curve
I’ve been doing quite a lot of presenting in recent weeks, and at the end of last week presented to two different sets of undergraduates at Manchester and Birmingham universities. It was part of a MediaGuardian Insight series into working in modern media, and my subject was digital media and the evolving landscape.
What struck me pretty forcefully at both places was how some of the things I take for granted - blogs, RSS, tagging, participatory media - are having little or no impact on these young people. When I was talking in Manchester, someone shouted “what’s plogging [sic]” from the back of the hall, so I asked people to put up their hands if they knew what a blog was. About a half-dozen hands went up. When I asked how many people had a blog, only one hand stayed up. When I asked about RSS, only a couple of hands waved. But when I aseked about podcasting, though, 30 or 40 hands went up.
What does this tell us? A few things:
- The UK is a very different place to the US when it comes to digital media consumption and usage. Social media platforms, such as blogs, are still very much the preserve of the digerati, and haven’t genuinely broken out yet.
- Digital media practitioners in Britain had better be careful they don’t get too far ahead of their audience. I spend a lot of my day talking about participatory media. Maybe I shouldn’t spend quite as much.
- Technology breaks out much, much faster when it’s linked to consumerism. I’m convinced that podcasting was recognised so widely because it’s linked to the iPod (which is in turn linked to iTunes, and Apple, and that great big sexy consumer machine that Apple has become). So where’s the RSS iPod? Will there ever be one? Maybe it’s just a mobile phone…
Could the BBC’s entrance into podcasting be having an impact on the understanding/adoption of podcasting? I am not sure of the interaction with the groups you talk to and the Auntie. Do you happen to know if people were listening to podcasting on portable devices (iPod or mobiles) or on the desktops?
That’s pretty much my experience with student journalists here in Canada: very low levels of awareness of a lot of the participatory technology. Each new class has a few more who blog, or use RSS, but adoption rates remain pretty low and I’m always taken a little aback that a middle-aged white guy like me is deeper into the tech revolution than the students are.
vanderwal, my impression was certainly that ipod ownership was driving podcasting, rather than any particular content that had been made available. Having said that, anyone who browses podcasts using itunes gets the impression that the BBC is already beginning to own that space. I’m particularly impressed with some of the local radio stuff they’ve put in there.
Out of interest, did you ask how amny of them had a LiveJournal? It seems that everybody and their wang (no, really) at the University of Kent has a LiveJournal, but people may not be making the mental leap from LiveJournal -> Blog.
That being said, the journals themelves don’t tend to be much more than angstfests and memesharing, but it might help you relate to what a blog is, and possibly explin the difference between a typical high-traffic blog and what the LJ crowd tend to do.
As as student at Wolverhampton University I can concur that not many people are into the whole blogging thing. I’ve seen quite a few people with MySpace accounts, a few others talking about podcasting but not many with their own blogs.
You’re right, Lloyd - very few media students appear to know what blogs are, which flies in the face of research (by the Guardian) which shows quite high awareness among that age group in general. More a commentary on the quality of students doing media courses, rather than on awareness in general?