Tuesday, September 15, 2009

I Did Not Know That 4.0

So... the new Did You Know? seems to have dropped its creeping yellow hoard approach to one focused more on media, which is a definite improvement. Still, I have to call bullshit on the second slide:

It is easier than ever to reach a large audience, but harder than ever to really connect with it.

Really? It used to be easier to really connect with a large audience? By what definition of "really connect?" This is true for the people who run television networks. Who else? Does The Economist find it harder to connect with a large audience than it did in 1990 when they used these slogans?

"The Economist - not read by millions of people."

"Never in the history of journalism has so much been read for so long by so few,"

Their global sales have doubled since 1997. Are they actually finding it harder to "really connect?"

I didn't make it any farther than that.

1 comment:

Joel VerDuin said...

If you didn't make it any farther, you missed:

"A million books published yearly"
"A Google Book Search scanner can process 1,000 pages per hour)"

Which means, that if an average book is 200 pages, that is 200,000,000 pages per year or 23,408 pages per hour.

So... what is this supposed to mean? - paper publishing is far outpacing Google's ability to scan/store???

The next slide includes a blip about the existence of 240,000,000 televisions and that 2,000,000 million are in bathrooms. This is less than 1%... and again, I am not sure if I am supposed to be amazed, or ... what?

I don't want to completely dismiss the tool which has actually given rise to some conversation, but too many people will give this, "oohs" and "ahhs" without really considering a great deal of things (like unsubstantiated feel good messages).

At the same time we do not look critically at something, we will complain that our kids lack this very skill too.