David Varney

Media Intake from a Generational Mix

David V. : The following set of interviews is on the subject of media and how a generational mix of people receive the different forms of media, meaning Internet, radio, print, and television.

The first person we’ll start out with is Amara. She is 11 years old, resides in the Winston-Salem, North Carolina area and she’s your atypical 11 year old.

Question : So when it comes to the different types of media, meaning; Internet, radio, print and television. Which one do you find that you participate in the most?

Amara: Radio.

Question : So do you read newspapers or magazines or anything?

Amara: Some magazines or articles. Out of the kids magazine, National Geographic. But that’s mostly it.

Question : So when it comes to the Internet do you actively participate in that type of media?

Amara: I don’t get on there allot….

David V. : … A couple times a day for an hour at a time….

Amara: …. Yeah, I’ll ask to get on and I’ll stay on there for 1 to 2 hours, but in the next 2 days I wouldn’t get on because I would be outside playing.

David V. : Yeah

Amara: But if it was like a rainy day yeah I would stay inside.

Question : So do your parents impose any type of restrictions on the use of the Internet?

Amara: They don’t care what time I get on or what time I get off. They just say, “Yes you can get on”, and when it’s about say it’s 6 o’clock when I got on, like 7 or 8 they would ask me to get off.

David V. : The next person is Josh. He’s 21 and from Greenville, Ohio.

Question : Where do you receive the majority of your media intake?

Josh: Over the Internet. MSN, CNN, Yahoo.

Question : So do you participate in any type of print media?

Josh: Rarely. Every once in a while I’ll get a newspaper, but I don’t get a, I’m not subscribed to a newspaper in Greenville or anything, so.

Question : In terms of the Internet. How do you, for the most part, participate in that type of media?

Josh: I usually go to Yahoo. I mean Sports updates or just overall news updates. Yeah basically I just watch, if the video seems interesting on Yahoo, on the opening page on Yahoo, I’ll hook it up. Like the presidential election I was always watching different videos on the candidates, and just because it’s allot faster and it’s updated allot more frequent than a newspaper. If was to get a newspaper I would have to wait for the next day to read up on something that’s with the Internet it’s always right there.

Question : Where do you see the future of the Internet going?

Josh: I see the Internet turning into the main source for everybody. The newspapers will stop printing just for the pure fact that not everybody is going to want to get a newspaper because it’s easier to just go online and Google search a topic and you could look it up, not just for that day, but for previous years.

Question : When it comes to the older generations do you see them participating in the Internet like you do?

Josh: No, they still watch the news at 6 o’clock, 11 o’clock, and then 7 o’clock in the morning to get their basic news. I mentioned something about YouTube to my mom and she didn’t even know what YouTube was.

David V. : The next interview is with Elliott. He is 31 years old and he’s from the Winston-Salem, North Carolina area.

Question : In terms of media intake, what types of media do you participate in the most?

Elliott: Mostly Internet and radio. I hardly ever watch T.V. I watch about 3 or 4 hours maybe of T.V. and that’s just junk. No news cause that all sounds the same to me. News, I usually use the Internet because there’s different sources, you can get different sides of every story and do your own research to get the most accurate news. Versus having it fed to you from the T.V. people which usually seem pretty biased.

Question : So how often do read any type of print media?

Elliott: Yeah, I’ll read a newspaper about 2 or 3 times a week.
Question : Where do you see the future of media going?

Elliott: I don’t think you’ll be seeing too awful many print newspapers for that long. You might see the bigs like Wall Street Journal, USA Today and some form of circulation, but it’s just too easy to go online to, uh. Like the paper at home is the Winston-Salem Journal. It’s just to easy to go onto their website, look at every story they’ve got in the paper, for free, online. That way you can just pick and choose and you don’t have a pile of paper that you spend 50 cents a day on and whatnot. It’s free, it’s convenient, no trash.

Question : What’s the main difference between media now and media from when you were a child?

Elliott: I think the difference is, before you had the, whenever I was a kid you had your 5 o’clock news, your 11 o’clock news, on T.V., on your major networks; ABC, NBC, CBS and that was it for T.V. news. You always had NPR and newspapers, which haven’t changed much. But on T.V., like I said, there was 3 or 4 or maybe 5 major networks that carried the news 3 times a day, morning, evening, and afternoon. Whereas now on cable you got, I can’t even guess how many news networks there are, MSNBC, and CNN, Fox and you just got 24/7 news. Which I think dilutes allot of things because 10 years ago what you would have never seen on the news is now on a ticker at the bottom of the screen and somebody’s talking about it and making a big deal about it and having the experts on. You know, if it’s on 24/7 I’m sitting here watching the screen I just go numb to it after awhile. Nothing stands out, nothing really strikes me, it just, I don’t know, it’s hard to explain. It just um, with 24 hour news coverage you’re basically just getting filler.

David V. : This next interview is with Carroll. She is 53 years old. She is originally from New Zealand and she currently resides in the Dayton, Ohio area.

Question : What type of media do you use most often?

Carroll: Um, I would say Internet.

Question : In what ways do you use the Internet?

Carroll: I search for vendors for my business. I look for products. I um, download information from our business website. I look at news items sometimes on there. And then other than that it’s just mostly business I do other than emails.

Question : So What other forms of media do you participate in?

Carroll: I watch the news allot on television and it’s just the regular channels, not cable. But, then I have, I listen to talk radio every day usually driving home from work. I don’t usually listen to it in the house, but I’ll use that for my drive time. Going to work it’s more I listen to comedy, it’s a talk radio, but it’s more comedy versus news. I hardly read the newspaper, I do read it it’s usually at work when I do, but we don’t get it at home. We use the Internet for that or the T.V., television.

Question : How is your media intake now different from when you were a child?

Carroll: Well we never even had television when we were kids. You read the newspaper or we used to listen to the radio allot. There was allot of, whether it was story time when we were little to…..

David V. : ..That’s the name of a program or….

Carroll: Well it was a… No, it was just every Sunday morning they had a, for kids, it was a radio station that just told stories, the old stories, like; Peter and the Wolf or The Three Little Pigs, or whatever it was and we used to listen to that. That was something my family did every Sunday. And then when we finally got television I was probably, probably 7 or 8 years old before we actually even had a T.V. in our house. It was radio and newspaper before that. Obviously news travels so much faster because of the Internet or telephones even. Even the telephone we didn’t have in the house. It was party lines where you shared a phone line. So, I mean people pickup a cell phone these days and, or you can download your information on the cell phone, I use my cell phone allot for actually getting information to. So, that’s another form I guess you would say which is a type of Internet. But, yeah its changed drastically.

David V. : The last interview is with Thelma. She is 75 years old and she resides in the Christchurch area within New Zealand.

Question : What forms of media do you find yourself participating in the most?

Thelma: Mostly I listen to the radio at home and probably the television.

Question : So do you use the Internet for any type of media viewing at all?

Thelma: No.

Question : So are you opposed to participating in the Internet or, what’s the reason why you don’t really utilize the Internet?

Thelma: No I’m not opposed to Internet stuff. The reason that I don’t look at it is because I’ve got an online communication with the computer and I have to pay per minute what I’m using. So I don’t use it because it’s expensive at home.