Print is Dead: Books in Our Digital Age

New York Magazine this week has a really interesting article where it features “media diaries” of three New Yorkers, listing every bit of media that they read, look at, consume, etc. And of course what I find interesting is how digital their lives are (especially the woman who bought an episode of “Gray’s Anatomy” on iTunes and watched it on her laptop; that’s totally cool, and a great example of the “on-demand everything/Attention Economy” times in which we now live). Also, you don’t see many diary entries like “1PM-6PM, sat in a bay window and read Tolstoy.” True, these are New Yorkers, and so may not be representative of the rest of the country, but I think it’s not too far off the mark of how lots of young people are living in our increasingly digital world.

Article intro: “When Time magazine put a crinkly, vaguely toxic-looking fun-house mirror on its cover and named ‘you’ the person of the year for 2006, the Establishment weekly was more or less cheering on its own diminution. After all, like most purveyors of mass media, from TV (see the nightly news) to the music industry (Tower Records, R.I.P.) to daily newspapers (which have lost over 20 percent of their stock valuation in the past four years), Time is facing both a vexing shift in consumer behavior and the rise of self-generated content. Of course, amid all this apocalyptic hype, young people are consuming more media than ever. But what is it they’re reading, watching, and listening to, exactly? We asked three members of the coveted 18-to-34 demographic to keep a diary of their habits for a week.”

NY Mag: The Media Diaries