Content - access versus ownership [from TheFeature]

Douglas Rushkoff churns out thought provoking essays like no other journalist in the mobile media sphere that I know of. In this TheFeature article he extends his 'contact not content' theory with an examination of the trend, among younger people in particular, away from the desire to own and hoard media towards merely

Central to his hypothesis is the idea that the more we accumulate and store digital goods the more of a chore it is for us to organize and access them. As long as we have ubiquitous access we shouldn't need to hoard.

So what does this mean for the wireless industry? A lot. It means that the next shift in content delivery and marketing may be as extreme as Steve Jobs' recent innovations in music distribution for Apple's iTunes (now imitated or soon-to-be imitated by the entire music industry).

It's a gamble, for sure, but the best place to invest in the future of content may be to focus on temporary delivery and always-on libraries. Kids are coming to believe that the person who takes responsibility for storing and maintaining the data is the one who deserves to be paid. And they're smart enough, at any rate, to realize that it's a job they don't necessarily want to be charged with, themselves.

"Attention is moving from commercially produced content to dynamic or contextual content. An example of this is the shift of Japanese youth spending from CD purchasing to karaoke to cell phone messaging. CDs let you passively consume content produced by companies. Karaoke is more interactive - you are part of the content. With Cell phone messaging, the customer creates the content."