Clay Shirky's speech at the Web 2.0 conference is a must read.
The main gist of it is, society is coming to grips with the free time obtained by the 5 day work week that started after WWII. Previously, television filled much of the free time void, but now people are starting to embrace other, more participatory, media or projects like Wikipedia.
I spend less time watching TV than I did 10 years ago. Although I do spend time with the TV as background music. Right now I am writing this with the Cubs game on in the background. During the week I spend most of my evenings playing poker online with the same group of 50-75 people spread across North America. My non-sports TV watching is mostly off of our DVR, other than "must see" water cooler discussion shows like 24 or Lost.
Right now the only network TV show I make sure I watch is 30 Rock. Survivor is fun to watch, but I don't have to watch every week. I watch stuff on the basic cable channels, History, Science, Food, Discovery, ESPN, etc., so I'm not a no-TV person. BTW, all of those channels are really great in HD, go get DirecTV if you can, they are cheaper than cable generally and have 90 HD channels.
I am interested to see what the TV ratings are like next week. Grand Theft Auto IV comes out on Tuesday, and lots of guys between 18-45 (including me) will spend much of the next few weeks playing. There has been some buzz about GTA IV hurting Iron Man's box office take next weekend. I agree with the EW article that it probably won't, but GTA sure could hurt TV ratings. Once you get pulled into one of these games, it is really hard to keep track of what time it is.
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