Two recent pieces have made the case that the future of TV is an isolated experience.

First, Michael Trucano of the World Bank has a post about the role of video in education around the world where he says:

…the trend of television viewing transitioning from a largely communal to an increasingly personal experience.  Indeed, just as tens of millions of families are purchasing their first TV, so too are tens of millions of individuals now starting to view broadcast video (for lack of a better term) on personal mobile devices.  Viewing television on your mobile phone, a phenomenon that began at scale in South Korea in 2005, is starting to be possible in many developing countries as well (like India).  This is not only happening on phones, of course (the video podcasts available through Apple’s iTunes U are just one notable example of opportunities for mobile learning via video on another sort of handheld device ). Re-conceptualizing educational television as a personal, and not communal, experience may challenge some of the fundamental tenets we have about the utility and delivery of video to meet learning objectives.

A week later, Nicholas Carr had a piece in the New York Times about changes to broadcast television. Amongst other concerns, he argued that television viewing was becoming an isolated affair:

As the technology of television changes, so, too, does the experience of watching it. In the past, TVs often served as the focal points of communal gatherings. Families or groups of friends would collect around the set to watch the prime-time shows or the weekend games. They would laugh at the sitcom slapstick, cheer for their local teams, chat through commercials and, during the duller stretches, keep one another from nodding off. TV may have been a vast wasteland, as Newton Minow, the F.C.C. chairman in the Kennedy administration, said in a speech in 1961, but at least it was a wasteland we shared.

The communal mode of TV viewing isn’t gone, but it’s becoming less common. As screens proliferate and shrink, and as the Web allows us to view whatever we want whenever we want, we spend more time watching video alone. That’s one funny thing about the Internet: it’s an extraordinarily rich communications system, but as an information and entertainment medium, it encourages private consumption. The pictures and sounds served up through our PCs, iPods and smart phones absorb us deeply but in isolation. Even when we’re together today, we’re often apart, peering into our own screens.

I don’t believe the worries about individualization are accurate. There is real truth behind all the hype about social media. Sure, my parents’ family watched Walter Cronkite together, but that was limited to 5-6 people in the same space and time.

Digital video, be it on mobile phones or PCs, is capable of breaking these barriers. Youth and adults alike can coalesce around clips or episodes from Sesame Street or Bill O’Reilly. Traditional broadcast TV, which was communal in a limited sense, is altered to break the limits of space and time (and, if TED Open Translation Project is any indicator, increasingly language).

Even more, efforts like Current.tv show that even video production, not just viewing, can be communal and shared.

There will be differences, I’m sure, but I think those could very well be to the benefit of education because they will certainly be social.

[Image credit: Jan Chipchase]