EXTRA!! EXTRA!!! DIGITAL MEDIA CONSUMPTION WILL SURPASS TRADITIONAL TELEVISION VIEWING THIS YEAR!!!!
The folks at eMarketer just released a study which projects that this year, adults will spend over 5 hours consuming digital media, as compared with about 4.5 hours watching television. This makes for a nice headline. It also makes for a wonderful example of the social construction of knowledge, and relatedly, the embeddedness of digital dualism.
A root assumption of Science and Technology Studies (STS) is that both science and technology, though billed as objective, are anything but. Knowledge systems, and methods of knowing (i.e. epistemologies), are necessarily based in human values, cultural norms, power structures, and historical context. Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar famously deconstruct the notion of scientific objectivity in their 1979 anthropological study of Laboratory Life. In this vein, Emily Martin illuminates the gendered ways in which biologists depict the egg-sperm relationship within the reproductive process. And a few months back, I argued that to be a Quantified Self requires quite a bit of qualitative interpretation and decision making. In short, Big Data, statistical techniques, and laboratory procedures produce knowledge that is equally as biased as storytelling or ethnographic interpretation. Sorry, Enlightenment.
Looking at the eMarketer study, the digital dualism becomes clear. First, the group is called “eMarketer.” Anything with an “e” prefix automatically gets the side-eye. Next, the decision to compare digital media consumption to traditional television consumption is hugely value laden. Why these two things? The report spends no time considering how these media relate or diverge from one another, but jumps into data presentation with the assumption that their comparison is sociologically and economically important. And then there is the definition of “digital media consumption.”
In this study, digital media consumption includes texting, reading on a tablet, using social media, doing *anything* on a digitally connected device, and using video streaming services like Netflix and Hulu.
Right. The authors compare doing a lot of different things (texting, Hulu, reading etc.) with doing one thing (watching cable or network television), and then report that people will spend more time on the lot of things than the one thing. In the sage words of the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer: “Does the word ‘Duh’ mean anything to you?”
The eMarketer report clumps together a diverse set of activities under the heading of “digital media consumption,” inherently separating out digital as its own homogenous category, and utilizing this category as a meaningful comparison variable. The design of the study is fraught with dualist assumptions, which are perpetuated when the results—presented in dry numeric form complete with tables and statistical values—spread into public discourse. Moreover, since a major goal of Enlightenment style scientific study is cumulative knowledge building, the eMarketer results set the stage (and the legitimacy) for new studies which will operate uncritically with the same problematic assumptions.
As a final unsurprising but conveniently timely note, the eMarketer report is peppered with the language of “online” and “offline,” reinforcing the need to critically examine language, as I argued last week.
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Comments 5
Rich ferrante — August 6, 2013
Adding to the amusement: aren't most people's cable boxes "digital"?
Atomic Geography — August 7, 2013
eMarketer is analyzing media consumption for a specific purpose - to determine how best to advise its clients about placing ads. In this context Netflix and legacy TV are of course quite different - no ads on Netflix. The digital devices are broken out in the "Ave Time Spent per Day..."table.
TV and the various devices are also different in screen size and other interface factors that might affect marketing.
There is nothing in this article that suggests eMarketer is adverse to or doesn't break digital media down further if you are a client.
A major implicit point of the article is that a retailer in the past could reasonably focus marketing on TV, but now, since the aggregation of different digital media surpass TV, this may not be sound.
This all seems quite functional to me. They are using categories functional to their task. I'm guessing their categories will evolve as the use of media evolves. Whatever dualist assumptions eM is making, I don't see the harm it causes.
New Aesthetic, New Anxieties — September 1, 2013
[...] think this is part of why “Netflix doesn’t count as watching TV” since if you “watch TV” in the most conventional sense, you’re sitting in front of a TV [...]