Mobile Impact for New Media

admin — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 22:34:05 +0000

Walk down a street in any major city in the world, and you ‘ll see everyone looking at their mobile. Even two people walking together – each will be looking at his/her own mobile device. It is truly a love/hate thing. According to comScore, the number of people using a mobile device to access news and information has doubled in the last year! And they say, 35% of us do this daily now. No surprise, really. Our cell phones are now the hub of our professional AND personal communications. I wanted to find out if anybody had landlines at home anymore…so I checked. According the the CDC (not sure why they’re studying this), three in ten adults have only a cellphone (no landline) and over 40% of 18-29 yr olds don’t have landlines at all. No doubt, we’re all becoming accustomed to being connected all the time with clients and global news as it happens. So the bottom line here is that new media is evolving and becoming more popular as quickly as technology will allow. More mobile usage…more new media…and more adoption by all. There is just more information available at our fingertips. I, personally see this as a good thing. We’ll have to suffer through some tough transitions, such as the newspapers morphing themselves into online-only newspapers and some won’t survive - that’s something we don’t like to see. Someone said to me the other day – ‘It is because no one reads the paper anymore’ – almost like our parents and grandparents used to say about walking to school…you remember the story. I read the NY Times everyday on my mobile, along with 5 other online versions of major metro newspapers. And it isn’t as though the 18-29 yr olds don’t want to read the paper, it is just that they don’t want to read the paper version with news that is often 8 hrs old! And so we shouldn’t lament the advantages technology allows us. We should embrace it…learn to manage it…and learn to put it down if we need to in order to have that balance. So go have a Guinness on this St. Patrick’s Day and check your email after you get home.

New Media Prof Blog » mobile

Mobile Impact for New Media