Okay. Well, I'll be very brief.
Basically, as he said, we did a media study among first-year communications students at McMaster just to see what their attitudes and behaviours were as far as media and new media were concerned. We used the data to generate a generalization of what a university student looks like as far as their media behaviours and attitudes are concerned.
According to the data we have, a typical university student owns a cell phone and a laptop computer and has broadband access at home and at certain locations on campus. And they often download music for free. I think it was something like 93% of the students we surveyed download music illegally. So that's kind of an exciting fact.
The student is an avid fan of YouTube, MySpace, and Facebook. I'll just say right off the bat that Facebook, at my university, is huge. Everybody has it, and if you don't have it, people are flabbergasted. It was pretty explosive how popular it is.
They'll occasionally glance at a blog, but they do not keep one themselves, although some of their friends do.
The student will typically watch TV at least once a day, and they regularly listen to radio, but unfortunately, rarely to CBC radio. They also read magazines quite regularly, at least once or twice a week. For reliable news information, they'll turn to traditional and Internet sources. I was kind of surprised to see that as many students read newspapers as they do, but apparently they do.
This individual relies on the Internet to keep in touch with a wide range of friends. But it's funny, because they worry that they're spending less time with their family and friends because they're on the Internet so much. So it's kind of a contradiction. They're concerned that time spent on the Internet is making them less productive at school, but in the same breath, they rely on the Internet for a lot of information, and they think the Internet gives them a wider variety of opinions.
So these are just some of their views. I'll just skip to the end.
Throughout our study, an important facet of media or new media was interactivity. I know it was briefly mentioned earlier how huge that is. Eighty-three percent of students said that they go on blogs and stuff like that. It's an opportunity for interactivity as far as just regular people being able to become authors and get their opinions out there and tell people what they think about various aspects of whatever they choose.
If we're asking whether new media is replacing traditional media, our data didn't really show that at all. People are still just as much engaged with traditional media as they are with new media. What they are doing, however, is using new media to supplement some of what traditional media provides. So if I want to watch Grey's Anatomy at 8 p.m. and I can't watch it at 8 p.m., I can go on YouTube and maybe get clips of it, or I can download it from the Internet from alluc.org. So I have an ability to still engage with traditional media, but not directly. It is more through new media.
I know that this is about public broadcasting and the future of the CBC, so I'll just cut to the chase. Basically, what we were asking is: does the Internet fulfill the role of the public broadcaster? In other words, does the Internet provide a space for discourse free of corporate interests? There's no denying that the Internet obviously provides a space for people to voice their opinions through websites, blogs, and those different vehicles. However, simply because there is an area provided to do so doesn't mean that these voices have an equal opportunity to be heard. For instance, there is only a handful of popular search engines. If your website isn't linked to Yahoo! or Google or something like that, you're not going to get the exposure that allows your voice to be heard.
So the role of the public broadcaster is integral to cultivating a Canadian identity. We cannot leave this responsibility to the uncertainty of the Internet.
Here are just as a couple of stats. Twenty-seven percent of students surveyed claimed that they somewhat or strongly disagreed that when compared to traditional media, they find more Canadian information on the Internet, and a large portion were neutral--they neither agreed nor disagreed. So either people aren't searching for this information or it's not being supplied. Then there is something like cbc.ca. Whenever I did a paper or anything like that, where I needed good, solid, credible Canadian information, cbc.ca was always my first stop, because I knew that what I was getting was credible and valid.
Basically, we think it's of fundamental importance that the CBC take advantage of new media platforms to help increase its popularity among young audiences, because we need our public broadcaster to be strong--now more than ever.