Tag Pew Research

Hey You Kids, Get Offa My Virtual Lawn!

The Pew Research Center is conducting a survey to determine the prevalence of behaviors that typify the “Millennial Generation” (people born after 1981) among all the age delineations in the U.S. You can take the survey here, and after you complete the quiz it will tell you how you compare. The questions focus on things like whether you get your news online vs. traditional media, whether you’ve given up having a landline telephone, and stuff like that, as well as a few things like whether or not you have a tattoo or body piercing and whether your parents were married when you were growing up.

I think of myself as being fairly “connected” with technology and modern media consumption, but as you can just about make out from that shrunken-down version of my score, I placed pretty much exactly with my “generation” (having been born in 1963, I am right on the cusp between Boomers and GenXers). My media habits are more like millennials, but my other social norms are decidedly rooted in the pre-Information Age. I have often been struck by just how “old fashioned” so many of my peers are, but now I think that just speaks to the transitional nature of being born at the dividing line between generations.

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This Just In — Paris Hilton STILL A Skank! Film At 11!

We are often told by our Media Elite that the reason we are force-fed a diet of celebrity news crap is because that’s what we want to see. But a recent study by the Pew Research Center counter-indicates that assertion.

The Pew study, which is a longitudinal look at news interest, finds that interest in “Celebrity Scandals” actually decreased from 22% in 1986 to 17% in 2006. Interest in “Personalities and Entertainment” almost doubled in the same period, but only increased from 9% to 17%.

The study concludes that overall there has been very little meaningful shift in public interest for types of news: we still love to watch footage of disasters, we are obsessed with weather, and the economy is always big news. But celebrity junk news remains at the bottom of the list of things we actually give a damn about seeing. Yet somehow, we are drowning in such urgent topics as Lindsay Lohan’s latest drunk driving incident, sissyfights between Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie, and the neverending saga of Brad, Jen, and Angie.

On the plus side, the last month or so of the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s News Index show that news coverage has trended away a bit from superfluous news after peaking with the Paris-in-jail story earlier this summer. Given that late summer is traditionally the slowest news period of the year, that may bode well for a little less celebrity crap for a while…at least until Lindsay Lohan OD’s and chokes to death on her own vomit.

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