We're all familiar with the concept of form factors: the shapes that our stuff tends to be, especially consumer electronics like phones, TVs, portable music devices. I'm not sure how useful this is, but it feels like we also see content in the same way; that there are dominant "shapes" to things we like to watch on tv and and listen to on radio, for example, shapes that we could call content factors.
Form factors are as much about what we expect our things to look like as they are about the way those things work. The two are interrelated, of course. Certain shapes work better than others, hence become popular and therefore dominate our perceptions of how those things ought to look.
Clearly, convergence in the means of transmission (everything is digital) and in the devices with which we consume content (more things have screens) means that in most cases the physicality of the object we access stuff on is irrelevant. Or rather, the device has little connection to the stuff we consume on it: I listen to radio on my TV, I read newspaper articles on my phone; I watch movies on my laptop.
Which brings us to what you might call the trinity of media: distribution, device, content. For a long time, those three elements were tied together. When we talked about TV we were talking about a self-contained system in which a wooden box with a screen displayed a certain style of content that was transmitted at a particular wavelength. Separate discrete systems provided access to other types of content that we call radio, movies and so on.
Then those discrete systems began breaking down. Movies were freed from the cinema screen first by broadcast TV then by video, for example. And digitalness completed the process by making everything available everywhere. And enabling me to listen to Smooth FM on my telly.
Except...except, the one element of that media trinity that hasn't yet converged is the content. We - most of us - still have a relatively clear and common understanding of what those types of content should look and feel like. These are the content factors that we expect to experience and demand of the content creators who make movies, tv, ads, news and so on. And, usually, those content factors were shaped by the discrete systems in which they were traditionally distributed and accessed.
The question is: how enduring will these content factors be now that they have been freed from the systems that created them? The movie content factor has been remarkably resilient despite many technological advances in transmission and access over the decades (more on that in another post). This may be driven as much by the fact that movie studios have found new ways to make money from the films they produce as it is by people's desire to watch movies. But, ultimately, the business model is irrelevant if people grow tired of the product. So clearly, we have a deep seated attachment to the movie content factor.
As "the kids" grow up with completely different media consumption habits, which of these old-world content factors will be replaced by new ones? And is there some sort of collective consciousness or memory that will protect and preserve some of them?
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