television and internet essay

Essay on Television for Students and Children

500+ words essay on television.

Television is one of the most popular devices that are used for entertainment all over the world. It has become quite common nowadays and almost every household has one television set at their place. In the beginning, we see how it was referred to as the ‘idiot box.’ This was mostly so because back in those days, it was all about entertainment. It did not have that many informative channels as it does now.

Moreover, with this invention, the craze attracted many people to spend all their time watching TV. People started considering it harmful as it attracted the kids the most. In other words, kids spent most of their time watching television and not studying. However, as times passed, the channels of television changed. More and more channels were broadcasted with different specialties. Thus, it gave us knowledge too along with entertainment.

Benefits of Watching Television

The invention of television gave us various benefits. It was helpful in providing the common man with a cheap mode of entertainment. As they are very affordable, everyone can now own television and get access to entertainment.

In addition, it keeps us updated on the latest happenings of the world. It is now possible to get news from the other corner of the world. Similarly, television also offers educational programs that enhance our knowledge about science and wildlife and more.

Moreover, television also motivates individuals to develop skills. They also have various programs showing speeches of motivational speakers. This pushes people to do better. You can also say that television widens the exposure we get. It increases our knowledge about several sports, national events and more.

While television comes with a lot of benefits, it also has a negative side. Television is corrupting the mind of the youth and we will further discuss how.

Get the huge list of more than 500 Essay Topics and Ideas

How Television is Harming the Youth

Additionally, it also makes people addict. People get addicted to their TV’s and avoid social interaction. This impacts their social life as they spend their time in their rooms all alone. This addiction also makes them vulnerable and they take their programs too seriously.

The most dangerous of all is the fake information that circulates on news channels and more. Many media channels are now only promoting the propaganda of the governments and misinforming citizens. This makes causes a lot of division within the otherwise peaceful community of our country.

Thus, it is extremely important to keep the TV watching in check. Parents must limit the time of their children watching TV and encouraging them to indulge in outdoor games. As for the parents, we should not believe everything on the TV to be true. We must be the better judge of the situation and act wisely without any influence.

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Home — Essay Samples — Entertainment — TV — The Importance of Television

The Importance of Television

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Words: 421 |

Published: Mar 16, 2024

Words: 421 | Page: 1 | 3 min read

Entertainment, information and education, cultural influence.

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Television Essay

Television is very useful. There are many advantages to the development of television. It was useful in giving the average person access to a low-cost kind of entertainment. Now that televisions are so inexpensive, everybody can buy one and have access to entertainment. Additionally, it keeps us informed on the most recent world events. Here are a few sample essays on ‘television’.

100 Words Essay on Television

Television is one of the most recent scientific wonders which connects people to the world. Television works well as a communication and entertainment medium. We may watch live broadcasts of significant sporting events, political news and other events taking place throughout the world. This gives us a direct understanding of things, places, and events that are far away. Thus, television has brought the entire globe into the living room. Through watching television we also become knowledgeable.

Television is also another effective tool for widespread teaching. Millions of people can receive educational programmes on health care, family planning, and general knowledge via audio-visual presentation on TV.

200 Words Essay on Television

Television connects the world. In the modern world, nothing is more familiar than television. In 1925, John Baird invented it. It was introduced in India in 1959. It is truly a wonder to behold in science. Television has two functions. On one side is the radio, and on the other is a movie theatre. Radio was listened to in the past but nowadays people go to movie theatres to see movies on the big screen. In many ways, television is a very beneficial tool. It is an effective tool for both instruction and entertainment. Through television people can study and gain knowledge.

Television shows us cinema and live telecast on games and sports. On its screen we have delightful scenery of nature and thrilling sights of animals roaming in the jungles and in the deep waters of the seas. We can enjoy many shows and serials and movies. It is also a mighty medium of advertisement.

People should watch television a minimum of half an hour a day. Sometimes television has a bad effect on children because they sit the whole day in front of television and see their favourite show which is very bad for them. Television is good for professional people and bad for unprofessional people.

500 Words Essay on Television

Television is the best thing to have in house. One of the most widely used technologies for entertainment in the world today is the television. Nowadays, practically every home has a television, and it has become fairly widespread. In the beginning people didn't want to use it but now everyone wants it in their house. This was primarily due to the focus on entertainment during that time. There weren't as many educational channels as there are now. Nowadays what you see on television is because of technology.

After the invention of television, the craze attracted many people to spend all their time watching TV. Parents started considering it harmful as it attracted the kids the most. Because kids spend most of their time watching television and not studying. However, as times passed, the channels of television changed. More and more channels were broadcasted with different specialties. Thus, it gave us knowledge along with entertainment.

Benefits of Watching Television

There are many advantages to the development of television. Television gives the average person access to a low-cost kind of entertainment and knowledge about the world. Now that televisions are not so expensive, everybody can buy one and have access to entertainment.

Television keeps us informed on the most recent world events. News from various parts of the world can now be obtained from television. Similarly, television also provides instructional shows that advance our understanding of science, animals, and other topics.

People are inspired to learn new skills by television as well. Additionally, television has a number of shows that feature presentations from motivational speakers. This show encourages people to improve their skill and lifestyle. You may also argue that television increases our exposure. Television broadens our understanding of many sports, world events, and other topics.

While television comes with a lot of benefits, television also has a negative side.

Disadvantage of Watching Television

We see that television broadcasts unsuitable material that encourages various social evil acts, like violence, eve-teasing, and more. Additionally, watching television for long periods is bad for our health. Our eyesight will deteriorate if we watch television for long periods of time. Our neck and back will also be painful as a result of our bad posture while watching TV.

Television also turns people into addicts. People avoid social connection because of their TV addiction. As a result, kids spend more time alone in their rooms, which has an impact on their social life. They become vulnerable due to their addiction and take their programmes way too seriously.

My Life Experience

When I was kid I used to watch television very much which affected my studies and physical health. After that my mother gave me some valuable tips about health and told me the disadvantages of television. I reduced the hours I spent watching TV and went to play games on the ground. After some time I noticed my health getting better and my mind becoming clearer. Television is good when people watch in their limits. But when people exceed their number of hours, then it will affect their mental health and body health. Television is beneficial because it gives knowledge about all the world and shows low cost entertainment.

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Depending on the video game designer job description and experience they may also have to lead a team and do the early testing of the game in order to suggest changes and find loopholes.

Radio Jockey

Radio Jockey is an exciting, promising career and a great challenge for music lovers. If you are really interested in a career as radio jockey, then it is very important for an RJ to have an automatic, fun, and friendly personality. If you want to get a job done in this field, a strong command of the language and a good voice are always good things. Apart from this, in order to be a good radio jockey, you will also listen to good radio jockeys so that you can understand their style and later make your own by practicing.

A career as radio jockey has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. If you want to know more about a career as radio jockey, and how to become a radio jockey then continue reading the article.

Choreographer

The word “choreography" actually comes from Greek words that mean “dance writing." Individuals who opt for a career as a choreographer create and direct original dances, in addition to developing interpretations of existing dances. A Choreographer dances and utilises his or her creativity in other aspects of dance performance. For example, he or she may work with the music director to select music or collaborate with other famous choreographers to enhance such performance elements as lighting, costume and set design.

Social Media Manager

A career as social media manager involves implementing the company’s or brand’s marketing plan across all social media channels. Social media managers help in building or improving a brand’s or a company’s website traffic, build brand awareness, create and implement marketing and brand strategy. Social media managers are key to important social communication as well.

Photographer

Photography is considered both a science and an art, an artistic means of expression in which the camera replaces the pen. In a career as a photographer, an individual is hired to capture the moments of public and private events, such as press conferences or weddings, or may also work inside a studio, where people go to get their picture clicked. Photography is divided into many streams each generating numerous career opportunities in photography. With the boom in advertising, media, and the fashion industry, photography has emerged as a lucrative and thrilling career option for many Indian youths.

An individual who is pursuing a career as a producer is responsible for managing the business aspects of production. They are involved in each aspect of production from its inception to deception. Famous movie producers review the script, recommend changes and visualise the story.

They are responsible for overseeing the finance involved in the project and distributing the film for broadcasting on various platforms. A career as a producer is quite fulfilling as well as exhaustive in terms of playing different roles in order for a production to be successful. Famous movie producers are responsible for hiring creative and technical personnel on contract basis.

Copy Writer

In a career as a copywriter, one has to consult with the client and understand the brief well. A career as a copywriter has a lot to offer to deserving candidates. Several new mediums of advertising are opening therefore making it a lucrative career choice. Students can pursue various copywriter courses such as Journalism , Advertising , Marketing Management . Here, we have discussed how to become a freelance copywriter, copywriter career path, how to become a copywriter in India, and copywriting career outlook.

In a career as a vlogger, one generally works for himself or herself. However, once an individual has gained viewership there are several brands and companies that approach them for paid collaboration. It is one of those fields where an individual can earn well while following his or her passion.

Ever since internet costs got reduced the viewership for these types of content has increased on a large scale. Therefore, a career as a vlogger has a lot to offer. If you want to know more about the Vlogger eligibility, roles and responsibilities then continue reading the article.

For publishing books, newspapers, magazines and digital material, editorial and commercial strategies are set by publishers. Individuals in publishing career paths make choices about the markets their businesses will reach and the type of content that their audience will be served. Individuals in book publisher careers collaborate with editorial staff, designers, authors, and freelance contributors who develop and manage the creation of content.

Careers in journalism are filled with excitement as well as responsibilities. One cannot afford to miss out on the details. As it is the small details that provide insights into a story. Depending on those insights a journalist goes about writing a news article. A journalism career can be stressful at times but if you are someone who is passionate about it then it is the right choice for you. If you want to know more about the media field and journalist career then continue reading this article.

Individuals in the editor career path is an unsung hero of the news industry who polishes the language of the news stories provided by stringers, reporters, copywriters and content writers and also news agencies. Individuals who opt for a career as an editor make it more persuasive, concise and clear for readers. In this article, we will discuss the details of the editor's career path such as how to become an editor in India, editor salary in India and editor skills and qualities.

Individuals who opt for a career as a reporter may often be at work on national holidays and festivities. He or she pitches various story ideas and covers news stories in risky situations. Students can pursue a BMC (Bachelor of Mass Communication) , B.M.M. (Bachelor of Mass Media) , or MAJMC (MA in Journalism and Mass Communication) to become a reporter. While we sit at home reporters travel to locations to collect information that carries a news value.

Corporate Executive

Are you searching for a Corporate Executive job description? A Corporate Executive role comes with administrative duties. He or she provides support to the leadership of the organisation. A Corporate Executive fulfils the business purpose and ensures its financial stability. In this article, we are going to discuss how to become corporate executive.

Multimedia Specialist

A multimedia specialist is a media professional who creates, audio, videos, graphic image files, computer animations for multimedia applications. He or she is responsible for planning, producing, and maintaining websites and applications.

Quality Controller

A quality controller plays a crucial role in an organisation. He or she is responsible for performing quality checks on manufactured products. He or she identifies the defects in a product and rejects the product.

A quality controller records detailed information about products with defects and sends it to the supervisor or plant manager to take necessary actions to improve the production process.

Production Manager

A QA Lead is in charge of the QA Team. The role of QA Lead comes with the responsibility of assessing services and products in order to determine that he or she meets the quality standards. He or she develops, implements and manages test plans.

Process Development Engineer

The Process Development Engineers design, implement, manufacture, mine, and other production systems using technical knowledge and expertise in the industry. They use computer modeling software to test technologies and machinery. An individual who is opting career as Process Development Engineer is responsible for developing cost-effective and efficient processes. They also monitor the production process and ensure it functions smoothly and efficiently.

AWS Solution Architect

An AWS Solution Architect is someone who specializes in developing and implementing cloud computing systems. He or she has a good understanding of the various aspects of cloud computing and can confidently deploy and manage their systems. He or she troubleshoots the issues and evaluates the risk from the third party.

Azure Administrator

An Azure Administrator is a professional responsible for implementing, monitoring, and maintaining Azure Solutions. He or she manages cloud infrastructure service instances and various cloud servers as well as sets up public and private cloud systems.

Computer Programmer

Careers in computer programming primarily refer to the systematic act of writing code and moreover include wider computer science areas. The word 'programmer' or 'coder' has entered into practice with the growing number of newly self-taught tech enthusiasts. Computer programming careers involve the use of designs created by software developers and engineers and transforming them into commands that can be implemented by computers. These commands result in regular usage of social media sites, word-processing applications and browsers.

Information Security Manager

Individuals in the information security manager career path involves in overseeing and controlling all aspects of computer security. The IT security manager job description includes planning and carrying out security measures to protect the business data and information from corruption, theft, unauthorised access, and deliberate attack

ITSM Manager

Automation test engineer.

An Automation Test Engineer job involves executing automated test scripts. He or she identifies the project’s problems and troubleshoots them. The role involves documenting the defect using management tools. He or she works with the application team in order to resolve any issues arising during the testing process.

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Ecology and theoretical physics - an unlikely couple, openmind books, scientific anniversaries, the less friendly face of “superfoods”, featured author, latest book, first the media, then us: how the internet changed the fundamental nature of the communication and its relationship with the audience.

In just one generation the Internet changed the way we make and experience nearly all of media. Today the very act of consuming media creates an entirely new form of it: the social data layer that tells the story of what we like, what we watch, who and what we pay attention to, and our location when doing so.

The audience, once passive, is now cast in a more central and influential role than ever before. And like anyone suddenly thrust in the spotlight, we’ve been learning a lot, and fast.

This social data layer reveals so much about our behavior that it programs programmers as much as they program us. Writers for the blog website Gawker watch real-time web consumption statistics on all of their posts—and they instantly learn how to craft content to best command an audience. The head programmer for Fox Television Network similarly has a readout that gives an in-depth analysis of audience behavior, interest, and sentiment. In the run-up to the final episode of the American television drama Breaking Bad , the series was drawing up to 100,000 tweets a day, a clear indication that the audience was as interested in what it had to say as what the producers were creating.

All this connected conversation is changing audiences as well. Like Narcissus, we are drawn to ourselves online and to the siren of ever-more social connections. In her book Alone Together , Sherry Turkle (2011) points out that at this time of maximum social connection, we may be experiencing fewer genuine connections than ever before. The renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan (1968, 73) saw the potential for this more than 40 years ago when he observed that augmentation leads to amputation . In other words, in a car we don’t use our feet—we hit the road and our limbs go into limbo. With cell phones and social devices, we are connected to screens and virtually to friends worldwide, but we may forfeit an authentic connection to the world. Essentially, we arrive at Turkle’s “alone together” state.

In the past, one could turn the media off—put it down, go offline. Now that’s becoming the exception, and for many, an uncomfortable one. Suggest to a young person today that she go offline and she’ll ask, “Offline, what’s that?” or “Why am I being punished?” We are almost always connected to an Internet-enabled device, whether in the form of a smartphone, fitness monitor, car, or screen. We are augmented by sensors, signals, and servers that record vast amounts of data about how we lead our everyday lives, the people we know, the media we consume, and the information we seek. The media, in effect, follows us everywhere, and we’re becoming anesthetized to its presence.

It is jarring to realize that the implication of this total media environment was also anticipated more than 40 years ago by McLuhan. When he spoke of the “global village,” his point was not just that we’d be connected to one another. He was concerned that we’d all know each other’s business, that we’d lose a measure of privacy as a result of living in a world of such intimate awareness. McLuhan (1969) called this “retribalizing,” in the sense that modern media would lead us to mimic the behavior of tribal villages. Today, the effects of this phenomenon help define the media environment: we consciously manage ourselves as brands online; we are more concerned than ever with each other’s business; and we are more easily called out or shamed than in the bygone (and more anonymous) mass communication era.

We maintain deeply intimate relationships with our connected devices. Within minutes of waking up, most of us reach for a smartphone. We go on to check them 150 or more times throughout the day, spending all but two waking hours with a mobile device nearby (IDC 2013). As these devices become omnipresent, more and more data about our lives is nearly permanently stored on servers and made searchable by others (including private corporations and government agencies).

This idea that everything we do can be measured, quantified, and stored is a fundamental shift in the human condition. For thousands of years we’ve had the notion of accountability to an all-seeing, all-knowing God. He kept tabs on us, for our own salvation. It’s one of the things that made religion effective. Now, in just a few thousand days, we’ve deployed the actual all-seeing, all-knowing network here on earth—for purposes less lofty than His, and perhaps even more effective.

We are also in the midst of an unprecedented era of media invention. We’ve passed from the first web-based Internet to the always-connected post-PC world. We will soon find ourselves in an age of pervasive computing, where all devices and things in our built world will be connected and responsive, with the ability to collect and emit data. This has been called the Internet of Things .

In the recent past, the pace of technological change has been rapid—but it is accelerating quickly. One set of numbers tells the story. In 1995, the Internet connected together about 50 million devices. In 2011, the number of connections exceeded 4.3 billion (at the time roughly half of these were people and half were machines). We ran out of Internet addresses that year and are now adopting a new address mechanism called IPv6. This scheme will allow for about 340 billion billion billion billion unique IP addresses. That’s probably the largest number ever seriously used by mankind in the design of anything. (The universe has roughly 40 orders of magnitude more atoms than we have Internet addresses, but man didn’t invent the universe and for the purpose of this chapter it is not a communication medium, so we’ll move on.)

Here is a big number we will contend with, and soon: there will likely be one trillion Internet-connected devices in about 15 years. Nothing on earth will grow faster than this medium or the number of connected devices and the data they emit. Most of these devices will not be people, of course, but the impact of a trillion devices emitting signals and telling stories on our mediated world cannot be overstated.

To visualize the size of all this, imagine the volume of Internet connections in 1995 as the size of the Moon. The Internet of today would be the size of Earth. And the Internet in 15 years the size of giant Jupiter!

Exponential change like this matters because it points out how unreliable it is to predict how media will be used tomorrow. Examining the spotty record of past predictions is humbling and helps open our minds to the future.

In 1878, the year after he invented the phonograph, Thomas Edison had no idea how it would be used; or rather, he had scores of ideas—but he could not come up a priori with the killer application of his hardware. Edison was a shrewd inventor who kept meticulous notes. Here were his top 10 ideas for the use of the phonograph:

Letter writing, and all kinds of dictation without the aid of a stenographer.
Photographic books, which will speak to blind people without effort on their part.
The teaching of elocution.
Music—the phonograph will undoubtedly be liberally devoted to music.
The family record; preserving the sayings, the voices, and the last words of the dying members of the family, as of great men.
Music boxes, toys, etc.—A doll which may speak, sing, cry or laugh may be promised our children for the Christmas holidays ensuing.
Clocks, that should announce in speech the hour of the day, call you to lunch, send your lover home at ten, etc.
The preservation of language by reproduction of our Washingtons, our Lincolns, our Gladstones.
Educational purposes; such as preserving the instructions of a teacher so that the pupil can refer to them at any moment; or learn spelling lessons.
The perfection or advancement of the telephone’s art by the phonograph, making that instrument an auxiliary in the transmission of permanent records.

He first attempted a business centered on stenographer-free letter writing. That failed, largely because it was a big threat to the incumbent player—stenographers. It would be years (and a few recapitalizations) later that music would emerge as the business of phonographs. And this was a business that survived for well over 100 years before cratering.

When I reflect on my own career, I see this pattern of trying to understand—“Exactly what is this anyway?”—constantly repeat itself. In 1993, I collaborated with Bill Gates (1995) as he wrote The Road Ahead . The book outlined what Gates believed would be implications of the personal computing revolution and envisioned a future profoundly impacted by the advent of what would become the Internet. At the time, we called this a “global information superhighway.”

I was working with Gates on envisioning the future of television. This was one year before the launch of the Netscape (then Mosaic) browser brought the World Wide Web to the masses. In 1993, we knew that in the coming years there would be broadband and new distribution channels to connected homes. But the idea that this would all be based on an open Internet eluded us completely. We understood what technology was coming down the pike. But we could not predict how it would be used, or that it would look so different from what we had grown accustomed to, which was centralized media companies delivering mass media content from the top down. In 1993 what we (and Al Gore) imagined was an “information superhighway”—Gates and I believed that this would be a means to deliver Hollywood content to the homes of connected people.

We understood that the Internet would be a means to pipe content to connected homes and to share information. But here’s what we missed:

User-Generated Anything . The idea that the audience, who we treated as mere consumers, would make their own content and fascinate one another with their own ideas, pictures, videos, feeds , and taste preferences ( Likes ) was fantastical. We knew people would publish content—this had been taking place on online bulletin boards and other services for years. But the idea that the public would be such a big part of the media equation simply did not make sense.
The Audience As Distributor, Curator, Arbiter . We’d all be able to find content, because someone big like Microsoft would publish it. The idea that what the audience liked or paid attention to would itself be a key factor in distribution was similarly unfathomable. It would take the invention of Google and its PageRank algorithm to make clear that what everyone was paying attention to was one of the most important (and disruptive) tools in all of media. In the early 2000s, the rise of social media and then social networks would make this idea central.
The Long Tail . In retrospect, it seems obvious: in a world of record shops and video rental stores it cost money to stock physical merchandise. Those economics meant stocking hits was more cost-effective than keeping less popular content on the shelves. But online, where the entire world’s content can be kept on servers, the economics flip: unpopular content is no more expensive to provision that a blockbuster move. As a result, audiences would fracture and find even the most obscure content online more easily than they could at Blockbuster or Borders. This idea was first floated by Clay Shirky in 2003, and then popularized by Wired ’s Chris Anderson in 2004. That was also the year Amazon was founded, which is arguably the company that has capitalized on this trend most. It has been one of the most pervasive and disruptive impacts of the Internet. For not only has the long tail made anything available, but in disintermediating traditional distribution channels it has concentrated power in the hands of the new media giants of today: Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook. (And Microsoft is still struggling to be a relevant actor in this arena.)
The Open Internet . We missed that the architecture of the Internet would be open and power would be distributed. That any one node could be a server or a directory was not how industry or the media business, both hierarchal, had worked. The Internet was crafted for military and academic purposes, and coded into it was a very specific value set about openness with no central point of control. This openness has been central to the rapid growth of all forms of new media. Both diversity and openness have defined the media environment for the last generation. This was no accident—it was an act of willful design, not technological determinism. Bob Khan at DARPA and the team at BBN that crafted the Internet had in mind a specific and radical design. In fact, they first approached AT&T to help create the precursor of the Internet and the American communication giant refused—they wanted no part in building a massive network that they couldn’t control. They were right: not only was it nearly impossible to control, but it devoured the telephony business. But as today’s net neutrality battles point out, the effort to reassert control on the Internet is very real. For 50 years the Cold War was the major ideological battle between the free world and the totalitarian world. Today, it’s a battle for openness on the Internet. The issues—political and economic at their core—continue to underpin the nature of media on the Internet.

The Internet Gives Television a Second Act

New media always change the media that came before it, though often in unexpected ways. When television was born, pundits predicted it would be the death of the book. (It wasn’t.) The death of television was a widely predicted outcome of Internet distribution, the long tail, new content creators, and user-generated media. This caused fear in Hollywood and a certain delight, even schadenfreude in Silicon Valley. At conferences, technology executives took great pleasure in taunting old media with its novel forms and reminding the establishment that “it is only a matter of time.” New media would fracture audiences, and social media would hijack the public’s attention. The Internet was set to unleash an attention-deficit-disorder epidemic, leading viewers away from traditional television programming en masse. Yet television is doing better than ever. What happened?

As it turns out, the most widely discussed topic on social media is television. One third of Twitter users in the United States post about television (Bauder 2012), and more than 10 percent of all tweets are directly related to television programming (Thornton 2013). New forms of content (as well as new distribution methods) have increased the primacy of great programming, not diminished it. Competing platforms from Google, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and others have meant more competition for both network and cable television networks—and more power for program creators over whose content all the new distributors are fighting.

Despite the volume of content accessible via online platforms—100 minutes of video is uploaded to YouTube every minute—people still spend much of their time watching television, and television programming continues to reach a large majority of the population in developed countries. In the United States, people consume an average of 4 hours and 39 minutes of television every day (Selter 2012). In the United Kingdom, nearly 54.2 million people (or about 95 percent of the population above the age of four) watch television in a given week (Deloitte 2012). Thus, it appears that the “demise of television” is far from imminent (Khurana 2012).

In fact, television is better than it has ever been. Few predicted, even five years ago, that we would find ourselves in the middle of a new golden age in television. There is more content vying for our attention than ever before, and yet a number of rich, complex, and critically-acclaimed series have emerged. Shows like Heroes , Mad Men , Breaking Bad , Game of Thrones , and Homeland are a testament to the success with which television has adapted to a new and challenging climate.

Networks are now developing niche shows for smaller audiences, and thrive on distribution and redistribution through new platforms. Hulu, Netflix, YouTube, and HBO GO have pioneered new forms of viewing and served as the catalyst for innovative business deals. The practice of binge viewing , in which we watch an entire season (or more) of a program in a short amount of time, is a product of on-demand streaming sites and social media. Before, viewers would have to consume episodes of televisions as they were aired or wait for syndication. Boxed DVD seasons were another way that audiences could consume many episodes at once, but this often meant waiting for networks to trickle out seasons spaced over time. Now, networks are pushing whole seasons to platforms such as Netflix at once. With enough spare time, one can now digest a whole series in an extremely condensed time frame.

This has changed not only our viewing habits, but also the nature of television content. Screenwriters are now able to develop deeper and more complex storylines than they ever had before. Where once lengthy, complex, and involved storylines were the domain of video games, we see this type of storytelling in drama series with some regularity. In addition, television shows are now constructed differently. As audiences become more conscious of the media and media creators, we find that programming is much more self-referential. Jokes on shows like The Simpsons , Family Guy , 30 Rock , and The Daily Show are often jokes about the media.

The consumption of television via on-demand streaming sites is not the only significant change to how we consume television content. There has been a tremendous shift in how we engage with television programming and how we interact with one another around television.

During the early decades of television, television viewing was a scheduled activity that drew groups of people together in both private homes and public spaces. The programming served as the impetus for such gatherings, and television watching was the primary activity of those who were seated in living rooms or stood before television sets in department stores or bars. Television continued to serve as a group medium through the 1960s and 1970s, but technological innovations ultimately transformed viewer behavior. The remote control, the videotape, the DVR, and mobile devices have led people to consume television content in greater quantities, but they do so increasingly in isolation. Once a highly anticipated social event, television programming is now an omnipresent environmental factor.

As television moved from a communal appointment medium to an individual activity initiated on demand, the community aspect of television has moved to the Internet. We have recreated the social function of television, which was once confined to living rooms, online—the conversation about television has expanded to a global level on social networking sites.

The sharp rise in multiscreen consumption is perhaps one of the most significant changes in modern media consumption, and has been a source of both excitement and concern among television network and technology executives alike. This form of media multitasking, in which a viewer engages with two or more screened devices at once, now accounts for 41 percent of time spent in front of television screens (Moses 2012). More than 60 percent of tablet users (Johnson 2012) and nearly 90 percent of smartphone users (Nielsen 2012) report watching television while using their devices.

Currently, television viewers are more likely to engage with content about television programming (such as Tweets or Facebook status updates) on complementary devices than they are to consume supplementary programming (such as simulcast sports footage) on a second screen. What is clear is that even if we are watching television in isolation, we are not watching alone.

Even when we’re alone, we often watch television with friends. Some 60 percent of viewers watch TV while also using a social network. Of this group, 40 percent discuss what they are currently watching on television via social networks (Ericsson 2012). More than half of 16 to 24-year-olds regularly use complementary devices to communicate with others via messaging, e-mail, Facebook, or Twitter about programs being watched on television (Ericsson 2012).

With all of this online communication, of course, comes data. With exacting precision, Twitter can monitor what causes viewers to post about a given program. During the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, a performance by Jay-Z and Kanye West generated approximately 70,000 tweets per minute (Twitter 2013). Later in the program, the beginning of a performance by Beyoncé generated more than 90,000 tweets per minute. Before she exited the stage, the superstar revealed her pregnancy by unbuttoning her costume. Tweets spiked at 8,868 per second, shattering records set on the social network shortly after such significant events as the resignation of Steve Jobs and the death of Osama Bin Laden (Hernandez 2011).

It is clear that television programming drives social media interaction. But do tweets drive consumers to tune in to a particular program? A report by Nielsen (2013) suggests that there is a two-way causal relationship between tuning in for a broadcast program and the Twitter conversation about that particular program. In nearly half of 221 primetime episodes analyzed in the study, higher levels of tweeting corresponded with additional viewers tuning in to the programming. The report also showed that the volume of tweets sent about a particular program caused significant changes in ratings among nearly 30 percent of the episodes.

The second-screen conversation about television programming is not limited to Twitter. Trendrr (2013), a social networking data analysis platform, recorded five times as much second-screen Facebook activity during one week in May 2013 than on all other social networks combined. Facebook recently released tools that will allow partner networks, including CNN and NBC, to better understand second-screen conversation taking place on the social network as it happens (Gross 2013). Using these tools, it is now possible to break down the number of Facebook posts that mention a certain term during a given time frame.

This real-time data—about who is watching television, where they are watching it from, and what they are saying about it—is of interest not just to television executives and advertisers, but the audience, too. There are several drivers for social television watching behavior, including not wanting to watch alone and the desire to connect with others (Ericsson 2012). Beyond connecting with the audience at large, dual-screen television viewers report using social networks to seek additional information about the program they are watching and to validate their opinions against a public sample.

I’ve witnessed times in my own life where watching TV alone became unacceptable. In order to make my viewing experience tolerable, I needed to lean on the rest of the viewing audience’s sensibility. Moments like these changed my relationship to the medium of television forever.

In January 2009, I watched the inauguration of President Barack Obama on television along with 37.8 million other Americans. As Chief Justice John Roberts administered the oath of office, he strayed from the wording specified in the United States Constitution. I recognized that something had gone wrong—the president and the chief justice flubbed the oath? How could that be? What happened? I immediately turned to Twitter—and watched as everyone else was having the same instantaneous reaction. The audience provided context. I knew what was going on.

Twitter was equally useful to me during Super Bowl XLV when the Black Eyed Peas performed at the halftime show. The pop stars descended from the rafters of Cowboys Stadium and launched into a rendition of their hit song “I Gotta Feeling.” It sounded awful. I turned to my girlfriend in dismay: “There is something wrong with the television. My speakers must have blown! There is no way that a performance during the most-watched television event of all time sounds this horrible.” After tinkering with my sound system to no avail, I thought, “Maybe it’s not me. Could it be? Do they really sound this bad?” A quick check of Twitter allayed my fears of technical difficulties—yes, the Black Eyed Peas sounded terrible. My sound system was fine.

As the level of comfort with and reliance upon multiscreen media consumption grows among audiences, content producers are developing rich second-screen experiences for audiences that enhance the viewing experience.

For example, the Lifetime channel launched a substantial second-screen engagement for the 12th season of reality fashion competition Project Runway (Kondolojy 2013). By visiting playrunway.com during live broadcasts of the show, fans could vote in opinion polls and see results displayed instantly on their television screens. In addition to interactive voting, fans could access short-form video, blogs, and photo galleries via mobile, tablet, and desktop devices.

There are indications that second-screen consumption will move beyond the living room and into venues like movie theaters and sports stadiums. In connection with the theatrical rerelease of the 1989 classic The Little Mermaid , Disney has created an iPad app called “Second Screen Live” that will allow moviegoers to play games, compete with fellow audience members, and sing along with the film’s score from their theater seats (Stedman 2013). In 2014, Major League Baseball will launch an application for wearable computing device Google Glass that will display real-time statistics to fans at baseball stadiums (Thornburgh 2013).

Music: Reworked, Redistributed, and Re-Experienced Courtesy of the Internet

The Internet has also completely transformed the way music is distributed and experienced. In less than a decade physical media (the LP and the CD) gave way to the MP3. Less than a decade after that, cloud-based music services and social sharing have become the norm. These shifts took place despite a music industry that did all it could to resist the digital revolution—until after it had already happened! The shareable, downloadable MP3 surfaced on the early web of the mid-1990s, and the music industry largely failed to recognize its potential. By the early 2000s, the Recording Industry Association of America had filed high-profile lawsuits against peer-to-peer file sharing services like Napster and Limewire (as well as private persons caught downloading music via their networks). Total revenue from music sales in the United States plummeted from $14.6 billion in 1999 to $6.3 billion in just ten years (Goldman 2010).

The truth was inescapable: its unwillingness to adopt new distribution platforms had badly hurt the music industry’s bottom line. Television (having watched the music debacle) adjusted far better to the realities of the content business in the digital age. But the recording industry was forced to catch up to its audience, which was already getting much of its music online (legally or otherwise). Only in recent years did major labels agree to distribution deals with cloud-streaming services including Spotify, Rdio, iHeartRadio, and MOG. The music industry has experienced a slight increase in revenues in the past year, which can be attributed to both digital music sales and streaming royalties (Faughnder 2013).

Ironically, what the music industry fought so hard to prevent (free music and sharing) in the early days of the web is exactly what they ended up with today. There is more music available online now than ever before, and much of it is available for free.

Applications like Spotify and Pandora give users access to vast catalogs of recorded music, and sites like SoundCloud and YouTube have enabled a new generation of artists to distribute their music with ease. There is also a social layer to many music services. Their sites and applications are designed to allow users to share their favorite songs, albums, and artists with one another. Spotify, SoundCloud, and YouTube (among others) enable playlist sharing.

The rapid evolution of online music platforms has led to fundamental changes in the way we interact with music. The process of discovering and digesting music has become an almost frictionless process. Being able to tell Pandora what you like and have it invoke a personalized radio station tailored to your tastes is not only more convenient that what came before it, it’s a qualitatively different medium. Gone are the days when learning about a new artist required flipping through the pages of a magazine (not to mention through stacks of albums at the record store).

As a kid I didn’t have much of a popular music collection, which was somewhat traumatic whenever it came to throwing a party or having friends over. The cool kids had collections; the rest didn’t. Telling friends to bring all their LPs over for the night didn’t make a lot of sense growing up in New York City, where they’d have to drag them along in a taxi or public bus. Fast forward to 2011. I was hosting a cocktail party at my home in San Francisco, which became an experiment in observing the effect of different kinds of Internet music services. In the kitchen, I played music via an iPod that contained songs and albums I had purchased over the years. (And my collection still was not as good as my cool friends.) In the living room, I streamed music via the Pandora app on my iPhone. Guests would pick stations, skip songs, or add variety as the night went on. Upstairs, I ran Spotify from my laptop. I had followed, as the service allows you to do, two friends whose taste I really admired—a DJ from New York, and a young woman from the Bay Area who frequently posted pictures of herself at music festivals to Facebook. In playing a few of their playlists, I had created the ultimate party soundtrack. I came across as a supremely hip host, without having to curate the music myself. Ultimately, everyone gravitated upstairs to dance to my Spotify soundtrack.

The iPod, Pandora, and Spotify all allowed me to digitally deliver music to my guests. However, each delivery device is fundamentally different. Adding music to an iPod is far from a frictionless process. I had purchased the songs on my iPod over the course of several years, and to discover this music I depended on word of mouth of friends or the once-rudimentary recommendations of the iTunes store. Before the introduction of iCloud in 2011, users had to upload songs from their iTunes library to an iPod or iPhone, a process that took time (and depending on the size of a user’s library, required consideration of storage constraints).

With Pandora came access to a huge volume of music. The Internet radio station boasts a catalog of more than 800,000 tracks from 80,000 artists. And it is a learning system that becomes educated about users’ tastes over time. The Music Genome Project is at the core of Pandora technology. What was once a graduate student research project became an effort to “capture the essence of music at the fundamental level.” Using almost 400 attributes to describe and code songs, and a complex mathematical algorithm to organize them, Pandora sought to generate stations that could respond to a listener’s taste and other indicators (such as the “thumbs down,” which would prevent a song from being played on a particular station again).

Spotify has a catalog of nearly 20 million songs. While the size of the service’s catalog is one of its major strengths, so too are its social features. The service, which launched in the United States in 2011 after lengthy negotiations with the major record labels, allowed users to publish their listening activity to Facebook and Twitter. The desktop player enabled users to follow one another, and make public playlists to which others could subscribe. In addition, users could message each other playlists. The sharing of Spotify playlists between connected users mimicked the swapping of mixtape cassettes in the late eighties and early nineties.

All of these are examples of how what the audience creates is a growing part of the creative process.

In the heyday of the album, the exact flow of one song to another and the overall effect was the supreme expression of overall artistic design and control. It wasn’t only the songs—the album represented 144 square inches of cover art and often many interior pages of liner notes in which to build a strong experience and relationship and story for your fans. It was a major advance over the 45, which provided a much smaller opportunity for a relationship with the band. With the arrival of MP3s, all of this was undone. Because we bought only the songs we were interested in, not only was the artist making less money, but he had lost control of what we were listening to and in what order. It didn’t much matter, because we were busy putting together playlists and mixtapes where we (the audience) were in charge of the listening experience.

The Internet has given us many tools that allow us to personalize the listening experience. More than that, listening to music has increasingly become a personal activity, one that is done in isolation. The simplicity with which music can be consumed online has changed music from an immersive media to a more ambient media, one that is easily taken for granted.

Interestingly, the rise in personal consumption of music (via MP3 and the cloud) has coincided with a sharp rise in festival culture. Now more than ever, audiences seek to be together—whether in Indio, California for Coachella; Black Rock City, Nevada for Burning Man; Chicago, Illinois for Lollapalooza; or Miami, Florida for the Ultra Music Festival—to experience music as a collective group.

At a time where we collectively listen to billions of hours of streamed music each month, nothing compels us in a stronger fashion than the opportunity to come together, outdoors, often outside of cell phone range, to bask in performances by our favorite artist. Festival lineups are stacked with independent artists and superstars alike. Interestingly, a lineup is not unlike a long playlist on iTunes. There is no way to catch every performance at South by Southwest or Electric Daisy Carnival—but there is comfort in knowing that many of your favorite artists are there in one place.

This has also proven out economically. At a time when selling recorded music had become ever-more challenging, the business of live music is experiencing a renaissance. In 2013, both weekend-long installments of the Coachella festivals sold out in less than 20 minutes and raked in $47.3 million in revenue (Shoup 2013). The rise of festivals (now one in every state of the U.S.) is a response to the Internet having made the act of consuming recorded music more ambient and banal than ever before while creating the need for greater social and immersive experiences.

At the core of going to a music festival or listening to The White Album with a group of friends is the need to experience music collectively. It is a realization that beyond even the song itself, perhaps the most inspiring and rousing element of music is not just the music itself, but our collective human experience of it.

Today, as the audience is restlessly making its own media, it is also learning fast that with new media come new rules and new exceptions. Media confer power on the formerly passive audience, and with that comes new responsibilities.

This was made startlingly evident in the wake of the April 15, 2013 Boston Marathon bombings. At five o’clock in the evening on April 18, the FBI released a photo one of the suspects and asked the public for help in identifying him. Hours later, the Facebook page of Sunil Tripathi, a student who bore a resemblance to the suspect and was reported missing, was posted to the social news site Reddit. Word spread that this was the bomber. Within hours the story was amplified by the Internet news site BuzzFeed and tweeted to its 100,000 followers. Only, Tripathi had nothing to do with the crime. His worried family had created a Facebook page to help find their missing son. Over the next few hours Tripathi’s family received hundreds of death threats and anti-Islamic messages until the Facebook page was shut down.

The audience was making media, and spontaneously turning rumors into what appeared to be facts but weren’t, and with such velocity that facts were knocked out of the news cycle for hours that day (Kang 2013).

Four days later, an editor of Reddit posted to the blog a fundamental self-examination about crowd-sourced investigations and a reflection of the power of new media:

This crisis has reminded all of us of the fragility of people’s lives and the importance of our communities, online as well as offline. These communities and lives are now interconnected in an unprecedented way. Especially when the stakes are high we must strive to show good judgement and solidarity. One of the greatest strengths of decentralized, self-organizing groups is the ability to quickly incorporate feedback and adapt. reddit was born in the Boston area (Medford, MA to be precise). After this week, which showed the best and worst of reddit’s potential, we hope that Boston will also be where reddit learns to be sensitive of its own power.

(erik [hueypriest] 2013)

We are now able to surround ourselves with news that conforms to our views. We collect friends whose tastes and opinions are our own tastes and opinions. The diversity of the Internet can ironically make us less diverse. Our new media are immersive, seductive, and addictive. We need only turn to today’s headlines to see how this plays out.

On October 8, 2013, a gunman entered a crowded San Francisco commuter train and drew a .45-caliber pistol. He raised his weapon, put it down to wipe his nose, and then took aim at the passengers.

None of the passengers noticed because they were attending to something far more interesting than present reality. They were subsumed by their smartphones and by the network beyond. These were among the most connected commuters in all of history. On the other side of their little screens, passengers had access to much of the world’s media and many of the planet’s people. They were not especially connected to the moment or to one another. They were somewhere else.

Only when the gunman opened fire did anyone look up. By then, 20-year-old Justin Valdez was mortally wounded. The only witness to this event, which took place on a public train, in front of dozens of people, was a security camera, which captured the scene of connected bliss interrupted. The San Francisco Chronicle reported the district attorney’s stunned reaction:

“These weren’t concealed movements—the gun is very clear,” said District Attorney George Gascón. “These people are in very close proximity with him, and nobody sees this. They’re just so engrossed, texting and reading and whatnot. They’re completely oblivious of their surroundings.”

Gascón said that what happened on the light-rail car speaks to a larger dilemma of the digital age. As glowing screens dominate the public sphere, people seem more and more inclined to become engrossed, whether they are in a car or a train or are strolling through an intersection.

In 1968, Marshall McLuhan observed how completely new media work us over. In War and Peace in the Global Village he wrote, “Every new technological innovation is a literal amputation of ourselves in order that it may be amplified and manipulated for social power and action.” (73)

We’ve arrived in full at an always-on, hyper-connected world. A network that connects us together yet can disconnect us from our present reality. An Internet that grants us the ability to create and remix and express ourselves as never before. One that has conferred on us responsibilities and implications we are only beginning to understand. The most powerful tools in media history are not the province of gods, or moguls, but available to practically all mankind. The media has become a two-way contact sport that all of us play. And because the media is us , we share a vital interest and responsibility in the world we create with this, our extraordinary Internet.

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You Are What You Watch? The Social Effects of TV

There’s new evidence that viewing habits can affect your thinking, political preferences, even cognitive ability.

By Jonathan Rothwell

Other than sleeping and working, Americans are more likely to watch television than engage in any other activity .

A wave of new social science research shows that the quality of shows can influence us in important ways, shaping our thinking and political preferences, even affecting our cognitive ability.

In this so-called golden age of television , some critics have pointed out that the best of the form is equivalent to the most enriching novels. And high-quality programming for children can be educational. But the latest evidence also suggests there can be negative consequences to our abundant watching, particularly when the shows are mostly entertainment.

The harm seems to come not so much from the content itself but from the fact that it replaces more enlightening ways of spending time.

‘Sesame Street’ as a social experiment

Cognitive ability is a complex characteristic that emerges from interactions between biological dispositions, nutrition and health, parenting behaviors, formal and informal educational opportunities, and culture.

Studying the connection between intelligence and television consumption is far from straightforward, but researchers have developed compelling ways to isolate the effects of television.

Some of the best research has been done on the television program “Sesame Street.” The show, which began in 1969, was meant to develop early literacy, numeracy and emotional skills for children of preschool age. A detailed analysis of the show’s content in its first and second years reveals that 80 percent of the program was dedicated to those goals, with the rest meant to entertain.

Researchers randomly assigned groups of low-income children age 3 to 5 into an experimental group and a control group. In the experimental group, parents were given access to the show if they lacked it and encouraged in person once a month to have their children watch the show.

[The topics new parents are talking about. Evidence-based guidance. Personal stories that matter. Sign up for the NYT Parenting newsletter for the info you need.]

Almost all (93 percent) parents of children in the experimental group reported that their children subsequently watched the show, compared with roughly one-third of children in the control group (35 percent). Among watchers, those in the experimental group also watched more frequently.

Over six months, from November 1970 to May 1971, the experimental group gained 5.4 I.Q. points — a large effect — relative to the control group and showed stronger evidence of learning along several other dimensions. Gains in cognitive performance were especially large for those who viewed the show frequently relative to those who did so rarely or never. A more recent meta-analysis of published research in 15 countries shows that “Sesame Street” has similar effects around the world.

In newly published research , the economists Melissa Kearney and Phillip Levine examined longer-term effects of “Sesame Street” by comparing the educational outcomes of children and young adults in counties more or less likely to have access to the program during its early years. They found that children living in counties with better “Sesame Street” coverage were less likely to be held behind a grade level.

Other experimental research is consistent with the original “Sesame Street” findings. Low-income prekindergarten children scored higher on a social competence index six months after being randomly assigned to an experimental group, in which their parents were encouraged to replace age-inappropriate television with educational television.

Less reading and more watching

In Norway, and a handful of other developed countries, average I.Q. scores have declined slightly in recent years, after rising for many decades. This is known as the negative Flynn effect, a variation of the more famous Flynn effect , which is named after the psychologist who first published comprehensive evidence of I.Q. gains over time. Among native Norwegian men taking an exam at age 18 for military conscription, those born in 1974 scored two I.Q. points higher than those born in 1987.

In an academic article published this year, the Norwegian economist Oystein Hernaes and his co-authors attributed some of this decline in I.Q. scores to access to cable television, which also coincided with a sharp decline in reading. After the introduction of cable in 1981, Norwegian teenagers and young adults drastically cut back on daily time spent reading from 1980 to 2000, and increased their time watching TV. Moreover, relative to public television, cable television had far less educational content and was focused on entertainment and advertisements.

To estimate the effect of cable television on I.Q. scores, the Norwegian scholars analyzed data on the introduction of cable network infrastructure by municipality. They calculated years of exposure to cable by considering the age of eventual test takers when cable became available in their municipality. They controlled for any potential geographic bias by comparing siblings with greater or less exposure to cable television based on their age when cable infrastructure was put in.

They estimate that 10 years of exposure to cable television lowered I.Q. scores by 1.8 points. In related research , Mr. Hernaes finds that exposure to cable television reduced voter turnout in local elections.

Berlusconi television

A similar study was conducted by the Italian economist Ruben Durante and his co-authors and released in this month’s issue of the American Economic Review. They examined the introduction of Silvio Berlusconi’s television network, Mediaset, which specialized in light entertainment such as game shows featuring scantily clad women.

The economists document that Mediaset devoted almost no programming to educational content and did not offer news in early years, whereas its main competitor — the state-owned channel — devoted the majority of its airtime to news or educational material.

To study the effects of Mediaset, Mr. Durante and his co-authors obtained data on the location of Mediaset transmitters in 1985 and calculated the strength of the broadcasting signal in every Italian municipality based on the position of the transmitters and other technical features of the municipality.

They found that children raised in areas with greater access to Mediaset (a standard deviation in signal strength) had lower cognitive scores as adults by the equivalent of 3 to 4 I.Q. points.

People more exposed to Mediaset as children were also less likely to be civically engaged adults and more likely to vote for parties with populist tendencies like Forza Italia and the Five Star Movement.

A handful of American studies along these lines have focused on the political consequences that news media coverage can have, showing that exposure to Fox News could increase Republican Party vote shares significantly, and that exposure to MSNBC increased Democratic Party voting share (but with a much weaker effect).

Art and public health

We know that education increases cognitive ability, so it stands to reason that educational television would also have a positive effect.

Concerns about culture are hardly novel: Plato made a case for regulating the quality of artistic productions to avoid the corruption of youth and weakening of their character. Twenty-three centuries later, it is easier than ever to placate children as well as lose yourself in entertainment options — in the ocean of online videos, podcasts, cable, and streaming shows and movies.

These options are most likely harmless. Some provide relaxation, and others may modestly reshape cultural attitudes for the better; one study found that the introduction of cable TV empowered women in India. High-quality shows and films can be inspiring, even edifying.

Still, media providers and advertisers compete aggressively for our attention. Most lack the altruistic motivations that guided the producers of the original “Sesame Street.” The evidence from social science suggests that biased or sensationalist news programs may misinform citizens or discourage civic engagement, and that we should also be cautious about what we give up for the sake of entertainment.

Jonathan Rothwell is the Principal Economist at Gallup, a nonresident senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a visiting scholar at the George Washington University Institute of Public Policy. He is the author of a book, “ A Republic of Equals : A Manifesto for a Just Society,” to be published by Princeton University Press in the fall, on the causes of income inequality. You can follow him on Twitter at @jtrothwell , and listen to his podcast, “ Out of the Echo Chamber .”

November 1, 2009

10 min read

How the Internet is Changing the Way We Will Watch TV

The Internet stands ready to upend the television viewing experience, but exactly how is a matter of considerable dispute

By Michael Moyer

It should not be so difficult. In an age when nearly all forms of media are digital, where broadband signals course through the industrial world as surely (and as critically) as electricity and freshwater, it should be possible to sit on one’s couch, push a button or two, and call up to your television any form of video-related entertainment you desire. New-release movies. Last week’s Lost . The first season of Cosmos . Setup should not require an electrical engineering degree, and you should not be forced to sift through 10 incompatible search functions to find the shows you desire.

Yet it is not easy to watch what you want when you want to. The reasons are not easily parsed and depend as much on technological circumstance as they do on the well-placed fears of entrenched industry powers. Digital distribution threatens their business models like nothing in the history of media, but as the music industry so dramatically illustrated, fighting the consumer’s desire for limitless content is a loser’s game. “I guarantee that five years from now TV as we know it is gone,” says Doc Searls, a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. “It will have been a 60-year-old experiment that will be followed by something else.” The major film studios are beginning to upload onto the Web their most precious material, and a plethora of devices are emerging that promise to help the confused consumer pull the richness of the Internet into his or her television. Behind the digital scenes, battles are now taking place that will shape the future of video for decades to come.

The Third Era The Internet’s invasion of the living room marks what might be called the third era of television. The first era arrived in the middle of the last century via bunny ears and national broadcast networks such as NBC and ABC that still command most television viewers. In the 1980s cable television ushered in the second era by using a new transmission technology—copper wires bundled into coaxial cables—to transmit hundreds more channels into the home.

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Although cable greatly expanded the menu of available content, it came at a price: what was once literally free to pluck from the air now had a serious monthly bill attached. Network TV was financed exclusively by commercials; cable networks such as MTV and the Food Network collect a fee—on average about $0.25 per customer per month—that comes out of your cable bill. (This average excludes ESPN, which demands about $3 per customer per month from the cable companies.)

In the late 1990s engineers working with the @Home startup figured out a way to deliver digital data on top of cable television signals. This meant that cable customers could get broadband Internet without additional infrastructure. Today about 36.5 million households nationwide use cable modems to get online, making it the most popular way to access the Internet in the U.S. Yet ironically, the relative ubiquity of cable broadband is one of the primary forces holding back third-generation television.

Cable companies grew into corporate giants by delivering the second generation of television. They are television distributors that also happen to deliver the Internet, not the other way around. Thus, despite the engineering workarounds that allow them to pipe the Internet via their copper wires, their systems are still optimized for television. On cable systems, the Web comes through the bandwidth reserved for a channel or a set of channels. It receives as much in the way of resources as does, say, ESPN and its four siblings. “There is a standing engineering set of specifications that almost requires the Internet be subordinated to television,” Searls says.

Almost as many U.S. households receive broadband through a telephone company’s digital subscriber line (DSL) service, but the story here is much the same: existing infrastructure—in this case, copper telephone lines—have been repurposed for high-speed Internet signals. The Internet is a secondary concern in this electronic ecosystem as well.

This setup makes it nearly impossible to get a true televisionlike experience over existing infrastructure, which shows in the quality of broadband available: the U.S. ranks just 18th in average broadband download speeds, slower than Romania, Iceland and the Czech Republic. Average download speeds in South Korea, the world’s leader, are nearly three times as fast as in the U.S. According to Phil McKinney, vice president and chief technology officer of HP’s Personal Systems Group, the network in the U.S. is the “fundamentally constrained resource.”

There is hope, however. Although telecom companies such as Verizon and AT&T also deliver cable television through their telephone lines, they are not as closely wedded to the TV-first model as the cable companies are. Their core business is delivering telephone service. As Americans stop subscribing to dedicated landlines—at last count, one in five American households rely purely on mobile phones—these companies have begun to build the next generation of data lines feeding into the home: fiber-optic cables. The bandwidth of these services reaches up to 30 megabits per second for both uploads and downloads—about 10 times that of the typical broadband customer. That leaves plenty of room for full high-definition video streams and quick uploads of YouTube videos. It is the first neighborhood infrastructure designed and constructed explicitly for the Internet.

Strangled by Cable Before your TV screen pulls in video via the Internet, those videos must first go up online. Copyright holders deeply fear this prospect. Movie studios fret about piracy. Over-the-air broadcasters such as NBC fear ending up like the newspaper industry, with viewership, though not advertising dollars, shifting to the Web. And cable broadcasters know that when Internet offerings grow strong enough for customers to drop their cable subscriptions—marketing surveys show cash-strapped customers will sooner drop cable than broadband Internet—their 25-cents-per-subscriber-per-month fees will evaporate as well. “The copyright holders are trying to orchestrate it so that content will only move if you pay for it,” says Philip Leigh, founder of consulting firm Inside Digital Media.

Thus, content providers are gingerly experimenting with ways to deliver their wares over the Internet. The first major salvo in this experiment is the Web site Hulu.com, which NBC and Fox launched as a joint venture in 2008 (Disney, the parent company of ABC, has since signed on as well). The site is the online home to most of the popular shows that air on those broadcast networks. It streams video in such a way that the end users can neither record the shows for posterity nor skip the advertisements. By any measure, it has been a tremendous success. At this writing, it is the second most popular video site on the Internet (after YouTube); according to the ratings service Nielsen, the ratings for programs such as Lost on ABC would jump by as much as 25 percent if online views were included.

Free video poses an explicit threat to the cable industry, however, which is built on the premise that customers will pay $50 a month or more for programming variety. As such, you will not find shows from the Discovery Channel or MTV on any exclusively ad-supported site. Rather the cable industry is beginning to experiment with Web sites that require a proof of registration. That is, you can watch these programs on the Web, but only if you also already subscribe to cable TV. Time Warner and Comcast are introducing the “TV Everywhere” system this year, which will at first include content from six networks, including CBS, AMC and TNT. If the companies are able to recruit other channels into the project, then “TV Everywhere will surpass user-generated content and will be the biggest thing in Internet video,” according to Comcast CEO Brian Roberts.

The allure for the cable companies is obvious: there is no risk of Internet video cannibalizing cable subscriptions if Internet video requires a cable subscription. “The carriers are also in the content business,” Searls says, “and so in order to protect the business models of the primary form of content they’re carrying—which is still television—they have an incentive to keep a heavier foot on the brakes than on the accelerator pedal.”

This brake is nowhere more evident than in the download limitations cable companies have begun to place on their Internet customers. Under the guise of protecting against peer-to-peer networking, where users share music and videos on a distributed network, Comcast has instituted a cap of 250 gigabytes per month on the data their customers can download or stream. Time Warner is experimenting with caps as low as five gigabytes a month. The companies claim that few customers are affected by the limits, which may currently be true. But it also kills Internet video in the cradle—a single high-definition movie will often require more than the five gigabytes Time Warner budgets for a month’s worth of Internet access.

Home Connections As Hulu has shown, there is a rich appetite for television content over the more flexible medium of the Internet. Yet getting video to your computer is one thing. Getting it to your 60-inch high-definition TV—and in a way that is easy to set up and intuitive to use—is another.

The most straightforward option is to simply connect a computer to your TV set. A standard high-definition multimedia interface cable, more commonly known by its acronym HDMI, will carry digital video and audio from a recent-vintage laptop to a flat-panel TV. “Computers have become such an everyday part of our life that when we look at the television monitor it is becoming obvious that there is no difference between it and a laptop screen,” says Leigh of Inside Digital Media. “Contrary to the uninitiated, consumers are not confused by this.”

Connecting one’s laptop to the television still leaves open the question of what to do for a remote control. Leigh’s answer—use a wireless keyboard and mouse—gives the user unconstrained power over content and, crucially, the ability to type in search terms. But we are now so accustomed to one-handed operation of a remote control that it is hard to imagine how bulky keyboards will replace them on the coffee table.

There is also the question of how to find content in a world without channels. Let’s say I want to watch an episode of 30 Rock . Was that on Hulu.com? Or TV Everywhere? Right now, McKinney says, “you need a secret decoder ring to figure out where the content is.” Stand-alone programs such as the free and open-source Boxee are designed to collect all video on the Internet and display on your television a single “home page” directory of everything. Yet here we see another example where open accessibility sometimes conflicts with cable’s business plans.

Although Hulu was originally featured as a channel on Boxee, this past February the content providers behind Hulu—NBC, Fox and Disney—blocked Boxee from accessing the Hulu Web site. When asked about it on-stage at the Wall Street Journal’s “D: All Things Digital” conference in May, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker said that “right now we are committed to Hulu being an online experience.” One way to interpret this statement is that Hulu is not a threat to the traditional cable business so long as the content on Hulu stays on a 15-inch laptop screen. Widespread use of Boxee (and other devices that make it easy to watch Internet video on the television) would cut into the revenue that studios make from cable television fees.

There are, of course, other devices that allow you to pull content down from the Internet into your television. Apple TV accesses the iTunes store. A startup named Roku makes a small device that pulls streaming video from Netflix, the Amazon.com digital library and Major League Baseball games. Other devices go by names like Vudu and ZillionTV. But they all share one common thread: all the content is prepaid. Free television does not exist on these Internet TV devices. So long as it is more profitable for both the cable companies and the content producers to sell you TV through your cable package, expect the limitations to remain in place.

The solution, of course, would be to detangle the Internet from cable companies. The new fiber-optic systems are a step in that direction. Because they are essentially “Internet-only” systems, disentangled from the legacy business models that constrain cable operators, they allow for a potentially transformative Internet experience. Consider South Korea, where the Internet is both fast and ubiquitous. Warner Brothers has begun to scale back its DVD operations there to concentrate exclusively on Internet-delivered movies, which are now available two weeks before the DVD appears in stores. Some independent movie studios in the U.S. have even begun to experiment with Internet delivery before the movie ever gets to a theater. It might take some time to move all our media to this kind of instant-on, Internet-based future. “But it’s coming,” Leigh says, “and you can’t stop it.”

The Internet’s New Rules When President Barack Obama signed the $787-billion stimulus package earlier this year, he claimed that the government would be “remaking the American landscape with the largest new investment in our nation’s infrastructure since Eisenhower built an Interstate Highway System.” In the 21st century infrastructure includes the Internet. The law provides for $7.2 billion in grants to upgrade and expand broadband access in the U.S., primarily in underserved rural areas that require miles of cables to reach relatively small communities. At the same time, the law requires that the Federal Communications Commission draw up a national plan for broadband by February 2010. What that plan includes—and how the grant money gets allocated—will largely define the capabilities of and restrictions on the Internet for years to come.

The primary question is whether the FCC is going to require some kind of “Net neutrality” protections in the national broadband plan. These protections would require that Internet Service Providers (ISPs) not hinder certain kinds of Internet traffic, that they treat all traffic equally. The ISPs claim that they could better preserve the overall health of the network if they were able to slow, for instance, bandwidth-heavy peer-to-peer file sharing. Yet without Net neutrality protections, ISPs would be able to block any kind of file or applications they chose, giving them the power to decide the fate of all Internet-based services.

In addition, the FCC has to decide on what, exactly, “broadband” means. It currently defines it as an advertised download speed of at least 0.77 megabit per second, a mere fraction of the average speeds of 92 megabits per second advertised in Japan. (Advertised speeds are always higher than actual speeds, because they assume a perfect connection that is not shared with other users.) A lower requirement means that more homes can be wired for less money but without the ability to stream high-quality video.

Note: This article was originally printed with the title, "The Everything TV."

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Essay on These Days Exposure to Television and Internet

Students are often asked to write an essay on These Days Exposure to Television and Internet in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on These Days Exposure to Television and Internet

Introduction.

These days, exposure to television and the internet is a common part of our lives. They are powerful tools that provide information and entertainment.

Television Exposure

Television is a source of learning and amusement. It offers a variety of shows, from educational programs to cartoons, which can influence a child’s thoughts and behavior.

Internet Exposure

The internet is a vast resource. It’s used for research, communication, and entertainment. However, it also has potential risks like cyberbullying and exposure to inappropriate content.

While television and internet hold immense potential, it’s important to use them responsibly. Parents and teachers should guide children in their usage.

250 Words Essay on These Days Exposure to Television and Internet

The digital age: television and internet exposure.

In the contemporary world, exposure to television and the internet has become a ubiquitous aspect of daily life. This phenomenon, driven by constant technological advancements, has profound implications on individuals and societies.

Television: A Double-Edged Sword

Television, once the primary source of information and entertainment, has evolved significantly. While it offers educational content and a window into global cultures, excessive exposure can lead to sedentary lifestyles and passive consumption of information. It’s crucial to strike a balance between beneficial and detrimental use.

Internet: A Web of Possibilities

The internet, on the other hand, is a vast, interactive platform offering a wealth of information and opportunities for social connection. It empowers users to create, share, and access content. However, it also presents challenges, including misinformation, cyber threats, and the potential for addiction.

Implications for Society

The effects of these technologies on society are multifaceted. They have the potential to foster global connections, democratize information, and stimulate creativity. Conversely, they can also contribute to social isolation, mental health issues, and the spread of false information.

Conclusion: Striking the Balance

In conclusion, the exposure to television and internet is a complex issue requiring careful navigation. It’s crucial to harness the potential of these technologies while remaining vigilant of their risks. As digital citizens, we must strive to use these tools responsibly, promoting their positive aspects and mitigating their negative impacts.

500 Words Essay on These Days Exposure to Television and Internet

The evolution of media exposure: television and internet.

In the contemporary digital age, exposure to television and the internet has become an integral part of our daily lives. The evolution of these media platforms has revolutionized the way we consume information, shaping societal norms and individual behaviors.

Television: The Traditional Medium

Television, as a traditional medium, has been a primary source of entertainment and news for decades. It has played a pivotal role in shaping public opinion, promoting cultural values, and spreading awareness about global events. Television’s power lies in its ability to create a shared experience, a collective consciousness that transcends geographical boundaries. However, the advent of the internet has disrupted television’s monopoly, introducing a new dynamic in media consumption.

Internet: The Digital Revolution

The internet has emerged as a game-changer, democratizing access to information and transforming the way we communicate. The digital revolution has brought about a paradigm shift in our media consumption habits. With the internet, information is now available at our fingertips, anytime, anywhere. Unlike television, which offers a one-way communication channel, the internet fosters interactive communication, allowing users to not only consume but also create and share content.

The Confluence of Television and Internet

The convergence of television and the internet has given rise to new content formats and platforms. Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Hulu have revolutionized the way we consume television content, offering a personalized, on-demand viewing experience. This integration has blurred the lines between television and the internet, creating a hybrid media environment.

Implications of Media Exposure

The increased exposure to television and the internet has profound implications. On the positive side, it has enhanced our access to information, promoting global awareness and cultural exchange. It has also democratized content creation, giving voice to marginalized communities and fostering social change.

However, the downside cannot be overlooked. The overexposure to media can lead to information overload, affecting our mental health. The proliferation of fake news and misinformation on the internet poses a threat to societal harmony. Furthermore, the addictive nature of digital media can lead to unhealthy habits and lifestyle changes.

Conclusion: A Balanced Approach

In conclusion, while television and the internet have significantly enriched our lives, it is essential to adopt a balanced approach to media consumption. As informed consumers, we must critically evaluate the information we consume and be mindful of our screen time. The challenge lies in leveraging the benefits of these media platforms while mitigating their potential drawbacks. The future of media consumption will hinge on our ability to navigate this digital landscape responsibly and mindfully.

That’s it! I hope the essay helped you.

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Essay on Importance of Internet: Samples for Students

Updated on
Nov 23, 2023

Internet is not just a need or luxury, it has become a household necessity. It was used as a source of entertainment but now it is impossible to work in offices or study without the Internet. When the global pandemic locked everyone in their house, it became an important medium to connect, study and work. Students were able to study without the risk of catching COVID-19 because of the Internet. The importance of the internet is also a common topic in various entrance exams such as SAT , TOEFL , and UPSC . In this blog, you will learn how to write an essay on the importance of the Internet.

This Blog Includes:

Tips to write the perfect essay on internet, sample 1 of essay on the importance of the internet (100 words), sample essay 2 – importance of the internet (150 words), sample essay 3 on use of internet for student (300 words).

Nikita Puri

Nikita is a creative writer and editor, who is always ready to learn new skills. She has great knowledge about study abroad universities, researching and writing blogs about them. Being a perfectionist, she has a habit of keeping her tasks complete on time before the OCD hits her. When Nikita is not busy working, you can find her eating while binge-watching The office. Also, she breathes music. She has done her bachelor's from Delhi University and her master's from Jamia Millia Islamia.

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Television Influence on People Essay

Interpersonal relationships depend on a variety of internal and external factors, and television remains one of the most controversial issues in human life. On the one hand, according to Martin and Jacobus (2019), social interactions offered on TV are predictable and rather slick, with no solid room for experimentation and imagination. On the other hand, access to television programs has already become a meaningful international movement (Martin & Jacobus, 2019). It means that information may be displayed on TV and provoke certain emotions and behaviors. People want to and can watch as many shows and episodes as possible to cover their personal needs and emotional satisfaction. They compare experiences, analyze environments, and develop discussions to demonstrate what they learn from the offered material. For example, high social expectations and new perspectives on obligations depicted on TV affect adolescents and adults. In this essay, analyzing the course reading and an interview with a friend allows learning that despite a common context and technical advancement, television has a great impact on people.

Despite the intention to control the impact of TV on children, it is hard for parents to ensure that proper shows and episodes are chosen for watching. During this interview, my friend recognized two shows that determined her childhood and adolescence – Friends (NBC, 1994-2004) and Beverly Hills 90210 (CBS, 1990-2000). At that moment, watching the chosen series was related to multiple positive emotions because the authors depicted the nature of teenage and adult relationships and the quality of life that American citizens could have (Martin & Jacobus, 2019). For example, in Beverly Hills , school and college education were described, with a special evaluation of current problems of drug abuse, sexual violence, bullying, and friendship. In Friends , attention was paid to the essence of friendship and situations when certain decisions should be made and preferences should be established. It was learned that even the most intelligent and careful people could make mistakes and needed to analyze their behaviors in particular contexts. Each show seriously impacted the interviewee’s behavior and acceptance of reality. Those stories prepared adolescents for their grown-up lives where racial, gender, and age inequality existed and put various restrictions on an individual’s activities.

The ways of making TV shows have changed with time, including various technological and social aspects, but their impact on people stays the same. Today, there is no need to wait for a particular time but use the Internet and watch favorite shows anytime. The interviewee shared her interest in such series as Grey’s Anatomy (ABC, 2005 – ) and Gossip Girl (CW, 2007-2012). Almost every episode brought some new experiences and emotions to her life because the characters lived their lives, solved problems, and achieved their goals. Martin and Jacobus (2019) notice that many modern episodes are self-contained, and it does not take much preparation or explanation in advance. Therefore, the number of viewers changes regularly, and some people demonstrate their interest or choose other shows. My friend admires Grey’s Anatomy due to its surgical themes and how health care has been recently improved. Gossip Girl is a show about modern teenagers, their problems, and their dreams. It reveals what young people want, what steps they are ready to take, and how family business affects children’s future. Instead of inspiration or motivation, these series provoke critical thinking and evaluation.

Addressing the chosen TV shows and learning the material from the textbook, it has become evident that television’s impact cannot be ignored. Despite the year of production and distribution, the main goal of any product is to entertain people and gain commercial benefits (Martin & Jacobus, 2019). However, modern researchers and sociologists admit that new programs are characterized by biased or sensationalist judgments that discourage social engagement and misinform people (Rothwell, 2019). Therefore, it is important to be cautious and accept the offered material for advertising purposes. Marked influence continues to grow and promote the American style of life in many countries abroad. Video art has become a serious competitor to commercial television, offering experimental and radical ideas to please the audience (Martin & Jacobus, 2019). This sphere of art has not been properly examined yet, but its abilities are unpredictable and captivating. Although some people are confident in the television industry, it is wrong to neglect the possibility of improvement but gain a better meaning. Compared to the adolescent period, when viewers admire opportunities and discover new sources of inspiration, adulthood makes them more attentive to the significant details.

Communication with my friend and the evaluation of old and new TV shows and video art ideas turn out to be a valuable experience in understanding how people should treat television. Different in quality and distribution periods, most series are similar in their context and purposes. They aim to describe human lives, address social, economic, and political problems, and show how certain decisions lead to certain outcomes. However, even if the episodes vary, their impact on people is definite – watching, learning, and following the examples. Images and sounds have been improved regardless of the viewer’s readiness or knowledge levels. Still, how individuals accept these stories has nothing to do with technology but personal judgments and attitudes toward society.

Martin, F. D., & Jacobus, L. A. (2019). Humanities through arts (10th ed.). McGraw-Hill.

Rothwell, J. (2019). You are what you watch? The social effects of TV. The New York Times . Web.

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A for and against essay about the internet.

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