Seth Godin rants in a recent post entitled 'Deliberately uninformed, relentlessly so' about those people who choose to get their opinions from shallow TV shows rather than taking the effort to read the news, or informative (and formational) non-fiction books.
It's possible Seth was having one of his rare bad hair days (quite an achievement for him), particularly when he goes on to say: Hal Varian at Google reports that the average person online spends seventy seconds a day reading online news. Ouch.
I'm guessing that he's quoting the following sentences from a piece Varian wrote back in March this year where he says: However, visitors to online newspaper sites don't spend a lot of time there. The average amount of time looking at online news is about 70 seconds a day, while the average amount of time spent reading the physical newspaper is about 25 minutes a day.
It's a bit of a surprise to see Seth talking about the 'average person.' As he's pointed out on more than one occasion (and I'm working from memory here, so I can't link to a specific blog post), there is no average person. [My italics, incidentally.]
The people who read online news don't equally spend 70 seconds each day. It does seem to indicate that a large number of them spend a small amount of time reading the news online, but we don't know, since we have no indication of how large a number of people this is altogether, or where this statistic comes from. Nevertheless, in order to get that average figure we would have to have a number of people who read the news online for a good number of minutes, maybe more than those who 'on average' read the newspaper for 25 minutes a day, as well as having a good number of people who read the online news for less than 70 seconds a day.
But we just don't know: 'Mr or Ms Average 70 secs' is a non-existent person, and should never be invited to anyone's party, not Seth's, nor Hal Varian's - not even mine.
5 comments:
Some facts to ponder.......
33% of high school graduates never read another book for the rest of their lives.
42% of college graduates never read another book after college.
80% of U.S. families did not buy or read a book last year.
70% of U.S. adults have not been in a bookstore in the last five years.
57% of new books are not read to completion.
There are over 17,000 radio stations and over 2,000 TV stations in America today.
Each day in the U.S., people spend on average 4.7 hours watching TV, 3 hours listening to the radio and 14 minutes reading magazines.
The projected average number of hours an individual (12 and older) will spend watching television this year is 1,750.
In a 65-year life, the average person will have spent 9 years glued to the tube.
Number of 30-second TV commercials seen in a year by an average child – 20,000
Number of videos rented daily in the U.S. – 6 million
Number of public library items checked out daily – 3 million
Percentage of Americans who can name The Three Stooges – 59%
Percentage who can name at least three justices of the U.S. Supreme Court – 17%
Thanks for these stats. Any idea where they actually come from?
How do we know that 33% of high school graduates never read another book? Who has checked this stat out?
If 80% of families didn't read or buy a book last year, then 20% of them are buying a very large number...can that be right?
Is it a surprise that the Three Stooges are better known than any 3 US Supreme Court Justices? The 3 Stooges, even today, have more visibility than any one of the Justices. They inhabit quite different worlds.
I note that the 'average' person will spend 9 years glued to the tube. But the 'average' person is a fiction, as I said in the blog post. I'm always cautious about such stats.
stats here.........
http://www.humorwriters.org/startlingstats.html
Thanks for that. Good to have the sources.
whilst on the subject of the value of education..............
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634
NZ has a similar problem.....promoting over education in such a tiny economy....no wonder they skip the country once they graduate.....
But back to the mindless Uncle Sam
http://www.americanthinker.com/printpage/?url=http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/america_is_gone.html
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