8: Instead, media without borders

In response to the challenges of pluriformity and sector collapse, our research began by setting aside the sectors and categories long assumed. It turned to users and asked them to talk through their daily media diet, in which media is anything you read, watch, listen to, or play. After establishing that diet, we asked users about different scenarios (you have two-hours leisure to yourself; you seek connection; what do you use to monitor) and asked if they use media for these purposes, and if so which.

Media diet turned out to be an easy way for most to talk about use. Importantly, it let us focus on regularly used and most important forms of media. Too many surveys ask questions like ‘which of these did you use in the last week’ that can’t distinguish between something used many times a day and something you might glance at periodically when bored. Existing question frames also lead us to equate time spent with importance or value. This isn’t unreasonable but it shouldn’t be regarded as always true or the most important indicator. Many of our follow-up questions about personal media diets and scenarios aimed to elicit the thinking and judgements driving use in order to pair an understanding of why people engaged each component of their diet.

Starting with recounting a broadly defined media diet is an aggressively ‘inductive’ approach (inductive research begins by forming ‘theories’ from observations as opposed to deductive research – aka scientific method – which tests a hypothesis). Such an approach was warranted by our sense that, for many, media use has changed a lot and that our personal experiences with media would be of limited use in understanding use broadly. We began without assumptions or an agenda, hoping to find patterns or ways to organize individual use into something comprehensible.

We had thought about ways to organize media use outside of industry sectors (TV, social media) and subsectors because we didn't want to force 'old ways' of knowing, but we’d need a way to make sense of the diets. Crucial here is appreciating the need to avoid category errors (see 5 and 7) that result from the variability of some of our most used categories. For example, knowing someone ‘listens to podcasts’ tells us very little. Podcasts are a category of content with extraordinary internal variation that can encompass serial mysteries, daily or weekly news digests, or topical banter that both entertains and informs. Knowing that someone ‘watches YouTube’ is similarly useless – it can be nearly anything at this point, likewise ‘social media.’ This is what interviews can reveal and what remains hidden in surveys.

Predigital categories weren’t perfect, but the scarcity of options and content helped make them fairly reliable, which is to say there was less variation in a category like ‘television’ or at least discrete variation (news, prime time, talk/game shows, soaps). To be fair, the bundled newspaper contained a lot of different content and one of the reasons we’ve been so ineffective at evolving what was the newspaper industry is the extent to which we failed to acknowledge the many different types of content that were bundled together to give it value. Most of it wasn’t news, and it turns out that a lot of the value was coming from parts of the paper other than journalism (but that’s another conversation).

The issue here is the need to understand why humans use media in categories that tie to the purpose of that use. The limited media and media content of the predigital era had enabled us to conflate ‘categories of media’ and ‘reasons to use’ because there was less variability in media. But given contemporary choice and control we needed to flip from categorizing media and media content, because it defied any boundary we imposed. Humans don’t need media in the way they need food or sleep or earnings to afford a living. So we started thinking about ‘what are humans trying to accomplish when they use media?’ 

Motives
In thinking across the vast array of media available to users – and the variation available within any one media form – we began to think about motives as categories. Users turn to media in response to different need-states that – because of the digital-era abundance of media and control over it – can now be resolved by media in many ‘sectors.’ We developed the scenarios used in our interviews to begin to test motives readily known or widely apparent (academic publications related to this: Lotz and Lunardi 2025).

Of course scholars and industry developed ideas about use in the twentieth century, but now people can do vastly more things or find media content vastly more relevant. Today’s media tools actually allow people to ‘use’ media and find ‘gratification’ in a way that was exponentially more constricted under predigital conditions. There are probably fewer than ten motivations for using media (I’ve been working with five with nested variation). Any one person will tend toward a few of these regularly and use others less frequently, but we don’t have much evidence about patterns. Routine and habits develop that also make use more orderly. But different people will use different media to fulfill the same motive; and the content each person uses within any medium or service is wide ranging and so varied that knowing the medium or service now tells us little to nothing about the content engaged. This is challenging to conceptualize at scale, so we must begin by studying individuals, look for patterns, and build up.

The need to prioritize and investigate motive more deeply derives from the expanded choice and control that characterize media use today. We lack adequate understanding of ‘why’ people use media or of the patterns that might structure the frequency of particular motivations and the content and features of services that reliably deliver to those motives. Why matters more now because far greater ends can be achieved. We are no longer limited to what can fit in the one local newspaper or the 24-hour schedule of any number of channels that could only offer one thing at a time. The scarcity of those forms of media thwarted our ability to use media as desired. Of course we still used media; we devoted a lot of hours to ‘good enough’ content because there wasn’t an option for greater fulfilment without substantially more effort or spend. The considerable fragmentation of use in the digital era makes clear people sought a lot more from media than they received.

Digging into contemporary media use reveals an uncomfortable reality about predigital media use: a lot of that use was, at best, regarded as ‘good enough’ by users: not chosen so much as available. The scale of specific use (discussed in 10) makes clear that digital-era users recognize that they don’t have to settle – though in some cases they will. Understanding why people use, what they will search for, when they will settle for less, even generally, makes the emerging patterns of use legible and offers a true basis for strategy.

There is much to learn about motives: what are most common? Is there much day-to-day variability in personal motives and how they’re addressed? Are there categorical (personally fixed) motive profiles or are motives best understood as ecological (context dependent)? What patterns exist/what explains patterns in how users try to fulfill motives? Generally, can we organize the variation in media use and motivation to understand its component parts, and if so, how? Understanding motivations provides the building blocks of strategy.