Evolving media - Teenagers chose net before TV

EXTRAORDINARY and relentless change is one of the defining characteristics of our time.

Though it is always vain to imagine that today’s generations have seen — and coped with — more change than any of our predecessors it is not a hard case to argue. Less than 50 years ago we put a man on the moon; 50 years before that most of humanity depended on horses for transport and 50 years before that millions upon millions died of diseases prevented today by a 10 cent vaccination.

After all there are people alive to today who, in the early part of their lives, depended on telegrams to communicate quickly over long distances. Now we use email, text or tweets to communicate instantly with anyone anywhere and, amazingly, think it unremarkable. The scale of that change, they way if affects how we live our lives — practically, emotionally or psychologically — should not be underestimated.

It has probably changed us in ways we do not yet recognise or understand.

International transport has become so everyday as to be almost a chore, especially if high-security airports must be negotiated before we reach our destination.

Emigrants of a lifetime ago could not have imagined how Skype might patch a heart torn by homesickness. The idea of emigration to America or Australia being a life sentence of absence and crushing loneliness cannot be easily explained to today’s refugees from this broken economy though their parents may, through the family memory bank, recall an uncle or a cousin who left for Boston or Brisbane in 1932 and was never seen again.

We are on the cusp of another change that will amaze people of a certain age but seem an entirely rational step to people born since Steve Jobs sold his first Apple Mac, a piece of furniture in nearly every home.

Television may be superseded as the medium of choice by a generation more used to participating than watching.

The results of a study by British media regulator Ofcom, which were published yesterday, showed that more teenagers would happily sacrifice television viewing rather than stop using their mobiles or the internet.

When you consider that RTÉ will not celebrate its 50th anniversary until January, when you consider the influence television has had on changing mores in this country, that is media evolution at a spectacular pace.

In a similar but differently engineered survey — Census at School — published this month by the Central Statistics Office it was found that nearly 40% of Irish children rely on television as their main source of news and less than half that use the internet as their primary source. Barely 10% relied on newspapers.

This change throws up all sorts of questions about credibility and our information sovereignty. It suggests that we need to devise a strategy that will secure our national broadcaster as a public service entity and possibly re-imagine how a whole range of reliable and important media are sustained.