My 16-year-old son never watches TV

[Mizmoon]

he plays computer games all the time and listens to his Ipod.

He also never listens to the radio - ever. It's downloading and Ipod.

Media as we know it will be totally evolved in 30 years. It will be changed. Such an odd thought ...

[SheepyMcSheepster]

1. i am kind of like that

i prefer to being on the computer reading websites or playing instead of watching tv.

tv has too many commercials!

[kick-ass-bob]

2. I used to watch 35-40 hrs a week of TV as a teen

(a lot of football on the weekends)

Now I watch 2-3.

[madmom]

3. my 21 year old doesn't either...

when she does it's what she calls the smart channels, discovery,history etc.

[KurtNYC]

4. Shhh

This is leading to the introduction of ads into video games. The ad industry knows that male teens are watching less and are now chasing them.

Massive said brand names like Coke, Paramount and Intel were already on board, with 40 games set to offer advertisements from Massive's network on in-game virtual billboards and shop windows by the end of the year. The company has been in "beta" testing on its network since last year.

As the key audience of men ages 18 to 34 increasingly embraces video games as a preferred entertainment medium, at the expense of traditional forms such as television, advertisers are looking at games as an attractive way to reach that high-spending demographic.

http://money.cnn.com/2005/04/11/technology/massive_gaming.reut/

The trend for the rest of us is toward 'embedded advertising' eg. Extreme Homemakeover's embedded Sears ads, and The Apprentice's various embedded ads.

[StuckinBFE]

5. This reminds me of two things

First, the Truman Show where their advertising was embedded into the show, I thought it funny in the movie. In reality it kind of scares me a little.

Secondly I just read "The Fall of Advertising and the Rise of P.R." by Al Ries & Laura Ries. Very interesting book on how advertising has become useless and more of an art form. I am not an advertising specialist (actually my degree is in electrical engineer) but since I went into the sales world I think about it a lot more.

[Lorien]

6. Do you notice that his opinions and attitudes

are significantly different from his peers? Is he as materially focus as other teens?

BTW- I conducted my own experiment at work with computer games years ago. I was supervising a group of other artists (mostly men in their 20s) at an animation studio. I was constantly having to tell them to put away their gameboys when we were doing a lot of overtime. One of the other supervisors commented that he felt that he could get more done if he "cleared out the cobwebs" with a computer game every four hours or so. So I took away their gameboys for a week, and they slowed down significantly. Then I returned them and told them they could play a 15 minute game every four hours (I got a gameboy for myself and did the same). Yep-we got more done. It seemed like the games helped to "reboot" our sluggish brains, lol!