New Media Wire – Mon Mar 05, 2007

Choose Your News Media Source

According to a poll, 98% of people in Bangkok prefer TV as their source for news. The poll wa conducted with just over 1200 people aged 18 to 60. [Monsters and Critics]

Now is that surprising? I’m not sure of the economic situation in Thailand, but in other countries, the newspaper is starting to be supplanted by news sites. With TV stations pushing their web presence with articles and video clips, and some newspapers following suit, that’s not surprising.

However, TV still has a higher ratio of visual content than a newspaper or website, and the majority of human beings are visually stimulated. In other words, the poll results are not that surprising. What would be more interesting is to conduct the same survey all over the world and compare.

TV Watching Linked to Obesity and Diabetes

If regular TV watching leads to poor nutrition, how much worse will Internet TV, or web surfing in general, affect us? Obesity is a major factor in diabetes, which has become an epidemic in North America. Those who blog at home for a living – that is, have no reason to go to an office to work – are suspectible to forgetting to exercise. Maybe we need a blogger’s marathon race or something of that sort?

New Media Drives Rice Cooker

Speaking of food… Information Aesthetics, which covers a lot of very unusual stories dealing with new media and relevant visualizations/ diagrams had a post recently about a news-controlled rice cooker. Each time an Internet news story about GM (Genetically-modified) rice is found, some rice is added too the cooker. Water is automatically added and the cooker turned on when it has enough rice. When the rice is cooked, dinner invitations are sent out by email.

Now, maybe if this MIT project was used to control food portions based inversely on amount of TV watching, we might reduce TV-induced obesity. Maybe for every hour you watch Internet TV or surf the web, you lose X calories from the day’s meals. Nah. I’d just find a online grocer and order some chips with a Paypal account.

Originally posted on March 5, 2007 @ 10:57 am