Unfortunately, I had absent from this week’s lecture because of some family matter, as I was pretty interested in this week’s topic, which related to the Australian TV industry and the SVOD streaming service Netflix (that I am planning to subscribe after submitting those bunches of assignments), since the TV might be one of the main industries that I’m willing to enter after graduated from university. I would rather to have a conclusion of this week’s lecture, then move on the last reading in Media 1, the Introduction and Epilogue extracted from the book The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu, which contain a lot of complex words (like 5 on average in each paragraph).
Thanks for the lecture slides, which could let me learn several specific terms in this industry, the SVOD, TVOD and AVOD services
Seems starting with statistics could be a nice way to introduce a topic, that it could tell us like how media had successfully involved in our life, that the each household could hold 6.4 devices in the average, and surprisingly, a quarter of household had subscribed Netflix, which had become the most popular paid Video-on-demand service in worldwide within a few years.
But how could this little platform been standing out from those 30 broadcast channels, and over a hundred of pay-TV services in Australia (over the world actually)? Perhaps we could figure out from the difference between the traditional TV and VOD services. First of all, and the most important one, what could they provide? As we all known, TV channels relied on schedules, that if you are interested in one of the programme, you have to sit down in front of the screen at a specific period of time in order to enjoy it. Oppositely, the VOD services have an enormous library of programme, no matter news, movies, shows or dramas, that could let us get into it at anytime, and whatever we are as many of them has now provided mobile service.
The only Netflix own-made drama that I had watched, which has wonderful story settings cr. Netflix
As well as, the different between the Netflix and other similar platforms, would be it had produced quite an amount of dramas with some innovative story and settings that TV producers afraid to try on, such as, the drama Sense8 that I had watched recently, had been filmed at nearly 10 different cities over the world, with a few nude scenes as its story is talking about ‘the mind & thought of 8 strangers had been linked together’.
The Attention Merchants
Moving to the reading, The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu, that I was pretty confused about what this term means at first. The Introduction started with a story happened in central California, an attention merchant, the EFP had became the board of the Twin Rivers Unified School District that their students are mostly teens and kids, which the company could provide corporate advertising to students that might not have the ability to distinguish how much proportion of those contexts are true, and what had been overstated.
one of the EFP’s infographics cr. Erin Behrenhausen
Likewise, a similar situation could happen to us as well, that we are now living in a world that’s being filled by attention merchants, different advertisements that took the control of our attention in the other word, where ‘our attention had been turned it into a form of currency’ as Tim mentioned, nowadays, even we kept staying at home, would still be surrounded by different kinds of advertisement, placement ads at dramas we watched, or even might appeared next to our Google search results, that sometimes would caught our eye and we could never escape from these.
Therefore, would there be any way for us to recapture the control of our attention span? Although these days we could block the advertisements by using some ‘tricky’ techniques like to download the Adblocker plugin from Google Play Store, or sometimes could be directly avoided by subscribing/upgrading to the ad-removal plan on several platforms, such as YouTube Red that released recently, and Spotify premium that contain ads removal and songs skipping feature. However, these methods still cannot completely kick these Merchants out of our daily life, so how about the ‘unplugging’ strategy that Tim mentioned, that pull ourselves away from all of our devices? Yeah, It’s extremely difficult to achieve absolutely, especially for us, students that nearly having all of our activities by a little laptop.
cr. theeffortlesslife.rocks
My way of having a rest between this all-in-one ‘distraction device’, would be living as the same way that I was a few years ago, that in high school, we’re not allowed to bring any devices to school, that we have to jot all we learnt, what we have heard by using a simple notebook. By applying it in university, I would rather try not to bring my own laptop to school, that taking notes by using the more traditional way (I admit that the heaviness of my laptop is the second reason why I won’t bring it to Uni), even though the smartphone would be as attractive as it has (that I mainly used for listening music), carrying as less devices as we can, could still effectively block ourselves from some of those distractions, right?