Interesting Observations on Methodological Studies, Amongst Other Things...

Here's some methodological studies for ya...

I took my sister, mum and dad and had them watch an episode of a variety comedy show on cable, where there's a random number of claymation skits ranging from 2 to 180 seconds or so long, for the entire 13 or so minutes of each episode. Now, I'm fairly used to getting things in little snippets here and there, most of my media is viewed through this stupid little interface on my computer, running a video there while I check a news article on that page and open up an image on another page.

Back to the participatory observation experiment...So, I wanted to see how my parents reacted to this show, given that they are both 'oldies' and the show is fairly fast paced without any room for contemplation, things just happen like that and are gone. To my suprise both my parents seemed to enjoy it, although due to the speed of the show there was a lack of the usual wisecracks inbetween jokes etc. An hour later, just after dinner my dad commented 'so, we gonna watch another episode of that robo chicken?' which I take means that he enjoyed it enough to watch it again. Can't really tell with him cause he's the type not to express enjoyement out loud till much after the occurance of the joke, or not at all.

The whole experience with getting them to watch the show was interesting because I automatically thought about something that had been discussed in lectures/tutorials early, the concept that we have altered our media viewing habits e.g. we view snippets of information from many sources while older generations would be more comfortable with traditional large blocks of info. I suppose my parents aren't a perfect example of your average 'oldies', my dad is constantly using the net, whether to check up on newspapers from the states, sports results from the states, surf cams for the east coast or to catch up with old school mates over connections etc. My mum, well, lets just say where she works they have a Mac network, and its BROKEN DOWN. Understandably she only uses the computer for emails :P