During the lectorial today Brian played a video about how much media Australians consume. Statistics ranging from the amount of TV people watched, all the way to the number of Tablets owned by the population. However, I found the statistics to be somewhat unbelievable. Meaning that I as a 20 year old Male living in Australia did not believe that people still preferred watching TV over browsing the internet.

So if we assume that the cenus was correct, why is it that I disagree with the statistics? This draws forward two potential thoughts for consideration; firstly, because i am only aware of the media consumption of similar demographic, and secondly, the weighting of the survey is equal and not objective.

The idea that i am only aware of media consumption within my demographic is fairly self explanatory; i prefer browsing the web to watching TV, my friends also do therefore, i would conclude that everyone does. Weighting of the survey however is a separate issue, for those of us who are mathematically inclined we will know about the normal distribution or bell curve, it is possible for this bell curve to be skewed if there is a bias of data on one side. I believe this happened with the survey. The data presented by Brian Morris might be mathematically accurate, however i dont believe this is a true representation. For this representation to be accurate we need to look more objectively and weigh up more strongly the media choices of those in the key consumer demographics. We know that currently in Australia we have an ageing population, assuming that older people are not computer literate it is most likely that television is their media choice. Once this data gets added to the census we suddenly think that the majority of the population prefers tv, when really the trend it quite heavily moving to internet TV.

Im not saying that we should disregard the media choices of the elderly, im just saying that the weighting of surveys needs to be looked at more objectively especially to the most active consumers of media.