Ball State University’s Center for Media Design has carved out a niche as the go-to outfit when it comes to reasearch on who spends how much time with which media. Its most recent report suggests that the computer dominates attention during the workday, while the television is the night time eyeball magnet. Telecommunications professor and CMD researcher Robert Papper summed it up thus:

“As in real estate, location is almost everything in media use. The television dominates at home, radio dominates the car and the computer dominates the workplace. Every category of computer use was higher at work than at home.”

Is passivity passe? Along similar lines, The Hollywood Reporter recenty wrote that “nearly half (49 percent of Americans in a survey) would play casual games rather than go to the movie theater, 32 percent opted for them over movies at home, and 37 percent chose them over watching TV.” (added)

The story was based on a survey performed by Harris Interactive and commissioned by RealNetworks. My instinct is to place less credence in company-commissioned studies, but this finding resonates with my own observations that young people in particular would rather interact that kick back.

YouTube for video games?: Microsoft hopes to turn the XBox into a game-development platform by selling a $99 toolkit that “will let anyone with the desire create their own video games and then share them,” according a report in PaidContent. The YouTube quip I used in the lead-in was offered by a Microsoft exec in an interview with the Associated Press. I like this idea. It demonstrates the interactive thinking that has to become part of every media business.