Film and the Audience of Tomorrow
(via) Web maven, social theorist and brainiac hottie Danah Boyd gave a talk at Cannes recently titled Film and the Audience of Tomorrow. She's posted her notes from the talk online. Here, she talks about the structural limitations preventing teens from actually going to the movies more often:
Teens *want* to go to the movie theater but there are structural limitations to their access.
First, there's money. Seeing movies is increasingly expensive and fewer teens have the money to afford a night out to the movies. In the US, there are fewer opportunities for teens to work and middle/working class parents have less discretionary income now than they did 25 years ago, making allowances harder to come by. Second, there's a lack of discretionary time. Middle and upper class teens spend a lot of their waking hours over-scheduled, running from activity to activity with little downtime. Third, there's a mobility issue. In the US, having a car is equivalent to freedom... without it, it's hard to get to the movie theater and this is even more true now because the huge movieplexes tend to be on the outskirts of towns, rather than easily accessible by bike or walking. Fourth, there are structural limitations to teens ability to leave their homes. Curfew and trespassing laws were relatively rare 30 years ago, but are in almost every US town now. Yet, more importantly, parents are afraid of all of the terrible things that might happen to teens if they are allowed out of the house. These forces affect many things, movie theater attendance being one of them. Going to the movies for teens is primarily seen as a treat and something that they beg to do when a big movie is coming out; when i was growing up, going to the movies was the default activity for the weekend. Again, this isn't about a lack of desire, but the lack of access will increasingly affect the film industry.
Think about this for a moment. Web savvy teens aren't abandoning movie theaters because it's more convenient to get media at home on their computers. They abandon theaters because of complicated social and demographic forces that conspire to make us a more atomized society. No wonder social networks are so popular.
