The Chaotic Era: Media Edition
Join me for this series on the chaos levers at play across tech, media, research, consulting and more.
They say a week is a long time in tech. But these days, that feeling has spread to other industries. Lately across the broader MRX, UX, research, and media landscape, it feels like the entire world is rebooting on-the-daily. We're in a full-blown "Chaotic Era."
Maybe the influence of Netflix’s "3 Body Problem" is fresh on my mind (thanks to some late-night sci-fi rabbit holes with my physicist husband), but this sense that we are in a time of chaotic freefall predates the launch of this show.
The current state of relentless change isn't just another innovation cycle. Midflight in a critical modality shift, I am on a pursuit to drive good discourse and engagement to help teams find clarity through the fog. We’ve talked about fear of AI, tidal category shifts, and measurement challenges here, but at the end of the day, chaos is the throughline.
Let’s take a look at a few of the chaos levers at play in the media and entertainment landscape in particular. (And perhaps we’ll expand this into a series as to how this extends to other areas such as the Market Research industry more broadly, within Tech, Business Strategy, Workplace, Retail, Travel and more?).
Today I’ll focus on some key “chaos-makers”: attention scarcity, the complex entanglement of our media ecosystems, the unintended consequences from the flood of content and shifting quality standards, and breakthrough technologies that will maintain their chaotic threat levels for years to come.
Chaotic Attention Spans: A Finite Resource on the Brink & Under Siege
Media and entertainment – a world obsessed with capturing our ever-shrinking attention span – has a big problem. Attention is a finite resource, and we're reaching peak scarcity. There are no more hours, minutes, or seconds to give without making serious tradeoffs, yet attention is our most critical monetization tool.
Dr. Gloria Mark, Professor of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine, has studied attention spans since the early 2000’s. Her research has documented the consistent decline of attention to a single screen. In 2004, attention was averaging around 2.5 minutes. In 2012, her measurements saw our attention cut in half, to 75 seconds, and a decade later in 2023, the steady plummet has continued, with viewers averaging just 47 seconds of uninterrupted focus on a screen.
We're bombarded with choices, swiping through endless content, and exhausted by fragmented media ecosystems. I myself can confess that I am prone to starting and stopping the same TV show about 50 times in a given night, and that’s when I am TRYING to provide my attention amidst myriads of distractions. Now just imagine that many-fold, in a household of four.
A Chaotic “Q.D.E.” Problem (Quantum Device Entanglement)
Just like entangled particles, our media consumption has become so intertwined across platforms and devices that it's difficult to separate where the value lies. Things have become so woven together that you might call them chaotically entangled. My husband, a physicist, may fight the merits of any physics metaphor I make (*more on that fascinating debate in the footnote), yet the reality is undeniable: our media universes have become tangled monsters. We are at peak Q.D.E. – Quantum Device Entanglement.
We stream clips of movies on TikTok, watch TikTok videos on YouTube, and cast videos from our phones to the TV. When SmartTVs become “dumb” (read: outdated) we plug in another device or dongle, watching more things through more apps in more ways than we can count. And that’s a simplification of a day in the life of an average media user. This insane web of complexity is one of the fundamental reasons why so many consumers are churning and creating bypass strategies.
When did TV get so complicated? Are we hallucinating? Can we disentangle it?
*A footnote from Dr. David, an actual physicist: “When two particles are quantum entangled that means that changing a property of one of them automatically changes the property of the other one – no matter how far away the partner is. For how quantum entanglement applies to the media landscape, we’ll have to get some NSF funding to run that experiment. ;-)”
A Chaotic Content Flood: Reshaping Quality Expectations
As if attention dwindling and tangled webs of platforms and devices were not enough, major studios have been on a ride of their own, revving their engines and pumping their brakes in chaotic content development cycles. Audiences are exhausted by the whiplash of investing in exciting new shows only to have them canceled, and the flood of content has led to changes in viewer definitions of quality.
The New York Times’s latest article, "The Comfortable Problem of Mid TV" by James Poniewozik highlights the mediocrity problem that adds to the landscape chaos. The strategy of some studios to pull in audiences with “good enough” TV backed by A-List celebrities and directors has been a conscious push to make “broadly palatable, uncontroversial” content.
From a researcher’s perspective, I see a critical need to refresh our fundamental assumptions about what viewers are looking for. Teams need to come up for air and make the space for new foundational explorations. We need better tradeoff research to help studios prioritize smarter and get bolder again.
Or as Poniewozik says “TV is far from broken, but it does feel like someone needs to go in and tweak the settings.”
Chaotic, Commercially Viable Tech Breakthroughs
Whether or not AR & VR are on your radar, we are coming closer every day to the hologram being an actionable and viable media form. These technologies will overcome novelty and find their commercial value and footing, and the most recent advances in AI and synthetic avatar tools may speed up those shifts. The world of “deep fakes”, fully immersive media, and new modalities of interactions may be terrifying. Are we prepared to question authenticity and truth around every corner, wondering what is fiction and what is reality?
In the best cases, these tools will transform the way we interact with media of all kinds. Over time it won’t just be the VISUALS that transform the experience; the way that viewers engage with and control new forms of media will also put significant pressures on classic design and engagement infrastructure. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) may become static and irrelevant as users grow to expect highly dynamic experiences and conversational and contextual AI integrations into everyday places.
So how does one survive this chaotic era?
How does one thrive in a completely unpredictable, non-linear moment when insignificant changes can have far-reaching consequences?
At the pace of this rapidly chaotic innovation, in 5 years the apps and platforms you interact with today may very well be completely transformed… and are likely to deviate far from their current 5YR Horizon Roadmaps. The companies best suited to adapt quickly will be the ones that survive. The worst thing we can do is sit and “wait to see”. It will be those who can embrace the change who will find immense opportunity.
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