Smart speakers sales increase fast

Considering the recent "surprise" data that all major manufacturers freely sell and share all your recordings it is really nice trend.

“The meteoric rise of internet-based activities cannot be understated: between social media, texting, gaming, and surfing the web, the average high school senior spent six hours a day online in 2016 — double the time from a decade earlier. Eighth graders (4 hours a day) and tenth graders (5 hours a day) didn’t lag far behind,” the report finds.

In the early 1990s, a third of 10th graders read the daily newspaper; that number had dropped to just 2% by 2016. What’s more, back in the late 1970s, 60% of 12th graders read a book or magazine almost daily, but just 16% had the same reading habits in 2016.

The study had some other interesting findings. Teen viewership of the boob tube — whether standard TV fare or movies — has plunged as well. “Twenty-two percent of eighth graders reported watching five or more hours of TV a day in the 90s; only 13 percent watched an equivalent amount by 2016.”

Jean M. Twenge, the study’s lead author, said the findings are odd since reading is now so simple. No more schlepping to the library or the book store, just click a link and boom, you’ve got a book to read.

Things are not improving, quite reverse is happening

Brands

“I have a foreboding of an America in my children’s or grandchildren’s time — when the United States is a service and information economy; when nearly all the manufacturing industries have slipped away to other countries; when awesome technological powers are in the hands of a very few, and no one representing the public interest can even grasp the issues; when the people have lost the ability to set their own agendas or knowledgeably question those in authority; when, clutching our crystals and nervously consulting our horoscopes, our critical faculties in decline, unable to distinguish between what feels good and what’s true, we slide, almost without noticing, back into superstition and darkness…

The dumbing down of American is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance”

Carl Sagan, 1995

If excessive media consumption is result of having “nothing better to do” as teenagers, it seems kind of inexplicable for adults. Once work takes up most of our time, we have a lot of better things to tend to. In theory, that is.

But somehow, the habit has taken hold. To quote Samuel Johnson, “the chains of habit are too weak to be felt until they are too strong to be broken.”

The truth is the moment we sit down on the couch and start watching, we’ve long accepted that none of the things we just planned will ever happen. We don’t need to “recharge.” We need to escape from the fact that we’ve become someone who accepts defeat before we even put up a fight.

https://medium.com/better-humans/how-to-stop-binge-watching-from-ruining-your-life-cd0e92f51750

It is all bad

TV sales are still good

Mr. Langlois is on a fixed income. To qualify for Element Care, a nonprofit health care program for older adults that brought him Sox, a patient’s countable assets must not be greater than $2,000.

Such programs are proliferating. And not just for the elderly.

Life for anyone but the very rich — the physical experience of learning, living and dying — is increasingly mediated by screens.

Not only are screens themselves cheap to make, but they also make things cheaper. Any place that can fit a screen in (classrooms, hospitals, airports, restaurants) can cut costs. And any activity that can happen on a screen becomes cheaper. The texture of life, the tactile experience, is becoming smooth glass.

The rich do not live like this. The rich have grown afraid of screens. They want their children to play with blocks, and tech-free private schools are booming. Humans are more expensive, and rich people are willing and able to pay for them. Conspicuous human interaction — living without a phone for a day, quitting social networks and not answering email — has become a status symbol.

All of this has led to a curious new reality: Human contact is becoming a luxury good.

https://l.facebook.com/l.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2019%2F03%2F23%2Fsunday-review%2Fhuman-contact-luxury-screens.html%3Ffbclid%3DIwAR26DzvTIdZgyg5lbG5LEMCmwipWnZyUj0hOsfBVRMXpbBly9GDg3k0eU4E&h=AT129Z2Mc-djHkJfbXxAfMkTwElFJrzukkoj8Ku_V55g50OoHyxwEx-Uy7QjM61yjdSnKV6HkvfLUJ6-eR_RIm9OiwInKAlVDB0wfhwQcJWXFzJFMLjkv89y1HkilOvfkk-G&tn=-UK*F&c%5B0%5D=AT1tBqAYaJb27Xc8xiftx-0SvVXDYPy6RIunZoRfSstWDYqiIRNLQ_UW8X_FIBYE_GEMZpnUJyePTO6dAx0CK4Swj_GEUTwBt3J9ZofgyjAtbsuglcgJULQmaiTZgX0NFDvN7_1a2p7hIUXuvGXvnVSPvYLGsmBYN82_RL36AeP0ihQ9lsdK2184Cdlp9W_sNDa0EHVTRn1EBvbH27E

People spending time most inefficiently now

According to StreamElements and Arsenal.gg, the live-streaming sector grew a full 45 percent between March and April; year over year, the industry is up by 99 percent.

Twitch — the biggest live-streaming platform — saw the most growth in terms of sheer hours, with its hours watched jumping 50 percent between March and April and a full 101 percent year over year. It’s now up to 1.645 billion hours watched per month.

Now imagine all this hours spent even on just understaning how stuff works, how economy works and so on.

But ruling class doing everything to prevent you to do so, including direct financing of all streaming platforms expenses.

Main reason is that leading media induced huge damege by telling people notto buy stationary PC, so people sat at home looking in their tiny phones. But things reversed and leading info agencies now have meetings on how to present issues with smartphones spending and why so many people are no longer want to buy one.