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The research paints a picture of steady decline in the US newspaper industry, with the percentage of Americans who regularly read print titles falling from 58% in 1993 to 34% in 2008.

According to the long-running survey, respondents saying they listened to radio news fell from 47% to 35% over the same period. As for network TV, the national news dropped from 60% to 29% and local news from 77% to 52%.

More than 40% of this traditionalist group are unemployed, and were found to prefer visual news stories to audio and have little interest in science or technology news.

A further 14% are described as "disengaged", a poorly-educated group with little interest in current affairs.

As indicated in the definition above, the rise of FREE LOVE* can be attributed to:






• An all-out war for consumers' attention (make that saturated consumers), including various handout and sampling techniques.


• The online world, with its amazing capacity to create, copy and distribute anything that's digital, with costs that are close to zero, forcing producers to come up with new business models/services, which are often purely ad-driven.


• The ever-decreasing cost of physical production makes it easier to offer more (nearly) free goods in the offline world too. In fact, many goods have actually become insanely cheap. Just one example: the price of televisions has fallen, on average, by 9 percent each year since 1998, according to U.S. Dept. of Labor data.


• The avalanche of free content created by attention-hungry members of GENERATION C.


• C2C marketplaces enabling consumers to swap instead of spend, making transactions cash-neutral.


• An emerging recycling culture.


• And all of the above fueling consumers' expectations to get online and offline stuff for free.

Student textbooks • U.S.-based Freeload Press provides free college textbooks in electronic form with advertisements inserted at chapter breaks. Inexpensive print-on-demand versions with no ads can be ordered for about USD 30. 'Customers' include students at four-year and two-year colleges throughout the U.S. and Canada. Freeload publishes primarily business and finance books. Students who register and complete a survey on Freeload's website can download a free PDF version of their textbook. Advertisers include Discover Card, PricewaterhouseCoopers and the College Loan Corporation.

In Europe, Danish Ventus Publishing runs a similar concept in 5 countries: (Denmark, Sweden, Germany, the Netherlands and Belgium). Ventus offers titles in the fields of economics, science and engineering, featuring ads from companies such as T-Mobile, British Airways and Deutsche Bank every four pages.

If giving is the new taking, then hundreds of thousands consumers/individuals are on the right path. Never before have we witnessed such an explosion of free content, courtesy of individuals who—for free, nada, zilch—are happy to share their thinking, their novels, their photos, their movies, their music, their knowledge and expertise, their advice, their crafts and more.

Call it GENERATION C, the HOBBY ECONOMY, the GIFT ECONOMY or CROWD MINING, as long as you don't forget that besides undeniable passion, this user-generated FREE LOVE provides participants with visibility, with respect, with status. Even if they participate anonymously (Wikipedia is a good example), it gives them bragging rights among other GENERATION C members.

Now, we’ve written and spoken about participation vs consumption so often that we won’t repeat the whole spiel, but two more thoughts:



Firstly, nothing indicates that user-generated content, both of the paid and the free kind, and in all its variety, is not here to stay.

Secondly, if many consumers are now producers too, and if they mostly produce for free, will they not expect a similar sharing and loving attitude from corporations? So as a brand, not only may you find yourself competing directly with individuals doing what you do for free, but you will also be confronted with growing expectations for your brand to be giving rather than just taking.

Forget class versus trash, the elite versus the masses.

Divide culture consumers into four new groups, says an international study Oxford University researchers released late last month that will have far-reaching results for arts support everywhere.

"Univores," "Omnivores," "Paucivores" and "Inactives" are the new categories we can all find ourselves in. Which one depends on whether we believe Britney is a huge tabloid star or an area in northwestern France where Impressionist painters spent their summers.

But no matter what group is discussed, the visual arts do not figure very high on anyone's to-do list.

"Omnivores," the next biggest group, includes people who go to the ballet, symphony or opera on occasion while still buying lots of pop culture.

For purposes of the study, cultural consumption was split into three basic categories: theatre, dance and the movies; music of all sorts; and the visual arts.

"We are unable to identify any numerically significant group of cultural consumers whose consumption is essentially confined to high cultural forms and who reject, or at least do not participate in, more popular forms," says the report.

Status counts, not class. And status is defined by income not by culture.

In short, the very idea of "pop culture" is a misnomer.

There is no pop culture. Pop is culture.

Better education does little to change this bleak picture. "There is a sizeable number of people in this group who don't participate" in the elite arts, Goldthorpe says

Why?

"The short answer is, I don't know," says Goldthorpe.

The mother of two young daughters, Mei, 5, and Clara, 2, Wa was also attracted to Montgomery Sisam because of the possibility of flexible work hours. "I'm the primary caregiver," she says. "But I want to do interesting work."

It helps that Wa and her husband, financial analyst Adam Parkin, are also committed to living downtown, close to work; they are among the small but growing number of families that make their homes in highrise condos.

"There are more families in our building than ever," she reports. "I founded a Parent Network in my building when my first daughter was born. We share a car with my husband's family."

Wa feels fortunate to be in a profession that can actually do something about the quality of city life and the public realm. She also serves on the Regent Park Revitalization Design Review Panel and was part of a symposium about high-density living organized recently by the city planning department.

"Architects have participated in the creation of a lot of our problems," she declares. "But now we're starting to think about the quality of the street. I think it's important to be optimistic."

Not surprisingly, the next big change in the development of the city also turned on a leap in technology: the invention of engines and manufacturing machinery. The Industrial Revolution did nothing at first to make urban life easier, but it did provide jobs—lots of them. With the new factories of the industrial age that began in the late 18th century was born an entirely new urban era. Peasants left the land in their multitudes to live in new cities, first in the north of England, then all over Europe and North America. By 1900, 13% of the world's population had become urban.

The latest leap, from 13% to 50% in just 107 years, also owes something to science and technology: improvements in medicine, coupled with new knowledge about ways to avoid disease, have enabled more and more people to live together without succumbing as once they did to diarrhoea, tuberculosis, cholera and other pestilences. The same developments, however, have similarly lengthened lives in the countryside, leading to a huge increase in rural population. Human ingenuity has not matched this increase with commensurate growth in rural prosperity. As a result, ever more villagers have been upping sticks to seek a better life in the city.

In the rich world, though, the city is undergoing very different changes. Many of the new towns that flourished in the Industrial Revolution and the manufacturing era that followed have been losing population. Even New York, for so long the epitome of urban sophistication, went through a bad patch in the 1970s. Some cities retain their role as administrative centres, by virtue of their political status. Some are still trading hubs, by virtue of their geographical position. Some endure simply because they have reached an equilibrium. But others struggle.

Of the traditional reasons for urban living, several (the presence of the shrine, the proximity of food) have lost their importance. Some of what the city provided (shops, factories) can now be offered in suburban malls or industrial parks—or in low-cost urban rivals in the developing world. Security, once one of the main reasons for huddling together, is often now more elusive in the druggy streets of the metropolis than in the exurbs. And technology, which has usually favoured urban progress, now enables people to work in rural bliss on home computers. No wonder so many cities find that in order to flourish they have to reinvent themselves.