By JOHN SCHWARTZ

Published: March 29, 2004

(中文大意)

　　现在很多二十多岁的年轻男女都不太愿意看电视，相反，他们对于上网浏览新闻或是下载音乐却是情有独钟、乐此不疲。24岁的芝加哥市房地产代理佩特-伯兰德尔(Pete　Brandel)就表示，他更喜欢上网查看新闻而不是看电视，因为电视上太多的广告是在浪费时间。

　　Nielsen　Media研究公司的数据显示，美国公众当中青年精英喜欢看电视的人越来越少，与去年相比，年龄在18到34岁的男性当中，爱看电视的比例下降了12%，而年龄在18到24岁的年轻男性当中，这一比例更是下降了20%。对于电视行业而言，上述数据无异于致命一击。

　　分析人士称，互联网的日益普及使得年轻人更加习惯于在网上打游戏、浏览体育新闻以及与好友在线聊天等。再加上宽带接入服务的扩展，计算机已经成了一个视频“百宝盒”，越来越丰富的网上游戏、DVD电影、音乐以及动画，甚至包括色情照片在内等内容均促使网络更加受到欢迎。专家称，上述因素中的任何一个都不足以导致年轻人爱看电视的比例下降，但它们合在一起却导致青年一族“无情地”远离电视。

　　另据comScore Media　Metrix研究公司的最新数据，年龄在18到34岁的男性当中将近75%的人均有上网的条件，使得这一年龄段的用户成为上网频率最高的一群人。与之形成对比的是，35到44岁的男性当中只有57%的人上网。

　　Starcom　MediaVest是一家帮助广告商决定如何在媒体上登广告的咨询公司，其主管里什德-托巴科瓦拉(Rishad Tobaccowala)表示，网络的娱乐功能日益增强，这使得电视作为登载广告的主要媒介的地位开始面临威胁。

Note to the television networks: Pete Brandel is not missing. He's right here, but like a lot of other 20-something men he's just not watching as much TV.

Mr. Brandel, a 24-year-old real estate agent in Chicago, says that these days he looks to the Internet for news and entertainment. Television, he says, is bogged down by commercials and teasers that waste his time.
 
"I'll go to the Comedy Central Web site and download David Chappelle clips rather than wait to see them on TV," he said.

The television industry was shaken last October when the ratings from Nielsen Media Research showed that a huge part of a highly prized slice of the American population was watching less television. As the fall TV season began, viewership among men from 18 to 34 fell 12 percent compared with the year before, Nielsen reported. And for the youngest group of adult men, those 18 to 24, the decline was a steeper 20 percent.

In a world where fortunes are made and lost over the evanescent jitterings of fractions of audience share, the Nielsen announcement was the equivalent of a nuclear strike, a smallpox outbreak and a bad hair day all rolled into one.

But those who track the uses of technology say that the underlying shift in viewership made perfect sense. The so-called missing men might be more aptly called the missing guys, and they are doing what guys do: playing games, obsessing over sports and girls, and hanging out with buddies - often online.

And the evidence is accumulating that the behavior of guys like Mr. Brandel is changing faster than once thought. The rapid expansion of high-speed Internet access lets the computer become the video jukebox that Mr. Brandel uses to watch comedy clips. The seemingly inexhaustible appetite for computer games, DVD players, music and video file-sharing - and, yes, online pornography - all contribute to the trend, these experts say. While no one activity is enough to account for the drop that Nielsen reported, all of them together create a vast cloud of diversion that has drawn men inexorably away from television.

A spokesman for Nielsen Media Research cautioned against reading too profound a societal shift into the ratings slide. Jack Loftus, the vice president for communications, took a gentle view of the ratings data, saying that the total loss of average viewership, spread out across the entire population of men 18 to 34, translated to a reduction of "about four-and-a-half minutes" a person each night, which he characterized as "a bathroom break." The amount of viewing time lost, he said, has not narrowed since October.

That is understandable, experts say, given that nearly 75 percent of males 18 to 34 have Internet access, according to the latest figures from comScore Media Metrix, making them the most wired segment of the population. By comparison, 57 percent of men from 35 to 44 are online, comScore found in research for the Online Publishers Association, which is releasing the results today.

Between the allure of high-speed Internet services, computer games and other activities, "you begin to have the ability to get entertained and distracted in a million ways, and not just television," said Rishad Tobaccowala, an executive with the Starcom MediaVest Group, a company that advises advertisers on where to put their money.

Incompatible survey methods make it impossible to say that a rise in one kind of activity corresponds precisely to a drop in another. But study after study show that those in the age range of the "missing guys'' are devoting much more of their time and attention to interactions that take them away from passive activities like watching sit-coms and even popular reality TV shows like "The Apprentice" and "American Idol.''

David F. Poltrack, executive vice president for research at CBS, says that the trend of young men watching somewhat less television is clear, but that the Nielsen numbers still do not add up. The effect "should have been seen gradually over time," he said, not "all of a sudden