SiliconBeat

The personal computer combined with the Internet changed everything. right? That seems to be one of the most essential maxims of the “new” economy. If you buy that, then this breathless release about “Groundbreaking Engagement Research” will be further proof of your worldview.

It seems that MTV Networks and Harris Interactive co-operated on “new” research that “reveals a critical companion metric to measuring audience size, pioneering a new way for advertising brands to target the most engaged and valuable audiences.”

The study “provides empirical evidence that” — are you sitting down? – “audiences develop stronger emotional connections to content and advertising messages when they consume and interact with them across multiple platforms.”

In the digital world, it’s called “multi-screen engagment”.

(You mean, like, receiving a “message” weekday mornings on the screen that is the back of the cereal box, then seeing that same “message” reiterated on Saturday morning on the TV screen?)

The study also “reveals” this nugget: “that some viewers are significantly, and even remarkably, more engaged with the content than others.”

For a culture as steeped in diversity as ours, doesn’t this revelation seem a tad obvious?

As more and more of the “new” economy seems to depend on finding ways to arrest our attention from the multiple diversions that same economy provides us, studies like these will no doubt serve a purpose. And for the record, we want to endorse whole-heartedly the belief that message-providers (um, in the print world they are known as advertisers) should consider the screen on which this post appears when deciding among their various delivery mode options.