By The Numbers

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OK

Here's a sobering statistic

The average American spends 4.5 hours a day watching TV.

And as video migrates to iPads, iPods and the web, that number is going to increase.

Good for us video makers

Now, here's the sobering statistic.

The average American spends 20 minutes a day reading.

Yep.

20 minutes

33 on the weekends.

That's what the Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics said in 2006.

And they ought to know.

One would think that in the past four years that numbers has declined.

Maybe not.

On the other hand, you've now consumed about one quarter of your daily reading quota just by getting to here.

What does this mean (other than a pretty good explanation for a lot of the candidates running for office this year)?

It means that in the realm of content, we are entirely a video based culture.

It means that all the yelling and crying over newspapers and their demise is really a tempest in a teapot.

Reading, it would seem (and concurrently writing) is (are?) over.

What is in ascendency is video.

We are a video eating culture, and it's only going to get worse (or better).

The real question is: who is going to produce the vast, almost unimaginable sea of content that people seemingly have an insatiable appetite to consume.

If we spend 12 years teaching people in school to read and write to participate in a print culture to which we devote 20 minutess a day, how are we addressing the part of our culture that demands 4.5 hours a day???

The answer is, we are not.

We are leaving that vast gaping part of what forms our society to the hands of a few people in NY and LA (and Silver Spring) who will decide what it is we see and think and feel and talk about.

There is something fundamentally wrong with this approach.

And, more to the point, it will not last.

Once people can crank out video content with the same ease (and proficiency and quality) that they crank out text, the video monopoly of a few media companies is going to be over.

And that is no bad thing.

There are a few billion dollars on the table.

Come and get them.