The Decline of Passive Knowledge

2 April 2009 | Culture, Internet, Marketing, Media, Social Media | Comments

I enjoy the podcast This Week in Media (or TWIM, which sounds somehow R-rated), hosted by Daisy Whitney. One particular comment in the latest episode (I think it was by Alex Lindsay of Pixel Corps) provoked my interest.

Alex mentioned that he and his wife do not watch broadcast television, preferring Video on Demand, downloads and the similar advertising-light or advertising-free media. One unexpected consequence of this preference is that when its time for them to go to the movies they frequently have no idea what the movies are about just from the listings online, and then they have either to guess based on title alone or go do research. (Presumably online research: Alex is such a digital hipster that I doubt he even gets an old fashioned newspaper complete with its big graphical ads that try to convey what the story is about.)

Potential moviegoers who also watch TV and read newspapers don’t have to work to hear the “in a world where…” preview about a forthcoming flick. Quite to the contrary, it is a lot of work to AVOID information about a movie when the trailer reveals most of the plot. Not so today for folks who have unplugged from the big media grid and plugged into the social media grid (Twitter, blogs, Facebook, On Demand media).

Just think about advertising jingles (examples to date myself, “Hefty Hefy Hefty, Wimpy Wimpy Wimpy,” “Just Pour it in and it Wooorrrks,” “I’d like to teach the world to sing…”); we didn’t WORK to learn these things– they crept in across the transom of our collective consciousness.

Without ubiquitous big media like TV or radio, Alex doesn’t have the passive knowledge about brands (media brands like movies and otherwise) that he used to have, and as our On Demand culture increases it seems likely that more and more people will be like him.

While folks will do hours of research about things that truly interest them, the likelihood of doing even a few seconds of research for low-consideration purchases seems dim. Brand marketers beware.

For those of you with a slightly academic bent, this might sound familiar to E.D. Hirsch’s argument in his 1988 book Cultural Literacy or to various other arguments about the once-pervasive role of the Bible or Shakespeare in our common culture.

From the Bible, to Shakespeare to, the oeuvre of Sherwood Schwartz (Gilligan’s Island, The Brady Bunch), the topics of passive knowledge have changed from generation to generation, but the existence of that body of common reference and allusion that links people together in an easy, “hey, do you remember when…” way is on the wane.

In its place comes what Jim Meskauskas calls, “an embarrassment of niches.”

We live in interesting times.

Note: Daisy Whitney will be speaking at our iMedia Agency Summit in May.