|
Competition is good for consumers. People vote with their
wallets and buy the best value for money. As more and more choices
become available, consumers learn to spot the differences. By that
logic, we would all agree that consumers are indeed becoming cleverer.
I am not so sure, however, about the development of their minds as
people.
Just because more people are learning to use every button on their
remote controls or mobile phones doesn't mean they are becoming more
intelligent. Anybody who has seen Jay Leno's "Jaywalking" on TV has
reason to worry.
Caught in front of a television camera, average Americans on the street
are unable to answer the simplest of questions about their leaders,
their history or geography and even less about the world outside.
They are also the people who elect "the most powerful man on earth".
Their counterparts surely exist everywhere, in every country. While
most owners of electronic media will argue against the motion, I
believe that television has a lot to do with the "dumbing down" of the
information that our societies consume today.
If you don't have to make the effort to read, you could willingly or
unconsciously become a TV junkie.
If information, whether it is the daily news or Discovery Channel, is
fed to hungry eyes and ears in bytes of glorious picture and sound, who
can resist? In the realm of entertainment, a book versus a sitcom is no
contest at all. The movie version of the same book wins by a margin of
millions.
Reading the printed word is an effort, a conscious act. The reward lies
in the stretching of the imagination, in seeing through the mind's eye.
Savoring the richness of a language makes the pleasure even greater.
In Asia, the challenge for the reading habit is two-fold, both can be
overwhelming. The first is the onslaught of television programing,
catering to just about every whim of every viewer. The second is the
growth of nationalism in every country and a byproduct of that zeal is
the diminishing status of English or French, wherever they existed.
Much of the joy in reading lies in the richness of the language, a
living thing that continues to get richer if it is nurtured. That
evolution takes time. Languages borrow and steal from each other, to
the chagrin of many die-hard native speakers, but with positive results
nonetheless.
In Asia, the Chinese, the Japanese and the Indians of today are
fortunate to have inherited rich, old languages. Uniting a disparate
archipelago with a single Bahasa Indonesia was a masterstroke, but
replacing English with Tagalog was not.
In Indonesia, reading as a daily habit is on the decline. With growing
national wealth and education, more people are qualifying as
"literates" but their "literacy" is questionable.
The younger the language, the fewer the options in expressing nuances
of thought. For the writer as well as the reader, the lesser the joy.
Perhaps the most obvious conclusion for promoters of Bahasa Indonesia
is that the language needs to be actively enriched, by hook or by crook.
The English robbed shamelessly from the French and the result speaks
for itself, around the world. Bahasa Indonesia needs to incorporate new
words from its root languages and dialects, then look beyond and
plunder from the world at large. It has been done over the years, but
more needs to be done and the sooner, the better. The chart illustrates
the urgency.
While almost everybody watches the "idiot box", the smaller number of
readers continues to dip in Indonesia. Reading via the web is in its
infancy here but its day will come and newspapers in particular should
prepare for that change.
Until then, every opportunity an advertiser has to use the print media,
every time an agency can recommend print, they should. Simply because
there is enough evidence that the power of the printed word is greater
than the fleeting picture for many products and services used by
readers.
Without it, the marketing, advertising and media fraternity can only
look forward to more clutter and diminishing returns from television
advertisements.
These observations are based on Roy Morgan Single Source, the country's
largest syndicated survey with more than 27,000 Indonesian respondents
annually, projected to reflect 90 percent of the population over the
age of 14.
That is a universe of 140 million people. The results are updated every
90 days and used by more marketers, media and creative agencies than
any other syndicated survey in the country.
There are many who believe that print as a medium is declining because
readers have to buy it in the increasingly "free" world of media, both
in the city and the village.
They need to recognize growth in other parts of Asia, led by India. In
a country where there are millions handicapped by poverty, there are
also millions more entering the middle class each year and reaching out
for newspapers and magazines, in the vernaculars as well as English.
Today, more Indians speak English every day than the British, second
only to the Americans.
|
