The current lean-forward, lean-back paradigm, conceived by Jakob Nielsen, was popularized around 2008 and yet (amazingly) it’s already showing its age. Consider that it predates the widespread use of touchscreen smartphones, the current dominance of tablets — the entire second screen phenomena — and even the widespread adoption of on-demand streaming media services like Netflix and Spotify. The world has turned in the past 5 years, and yet this framework remains a popular if not standard convention for analyzing data consumption in the media business.

It’s time advertisers, marketers and content creators had a more accurate, more nuanced and granular system to describe how consumers interact with their digital content. The result would offer better opportunities for everything from UX design to monetization and marketing.

Following is a two-fold system that, unlike the lean forward/back shorthand, breaks apart the physical and mental attributes involved when we consume content. When we analyze them this way in their component parts, a clearer, more targetable picture of consumer interaction emerges.

Body: Physical attributes

When we interact with today’s four major screen types — TV, PC, mobile, and tablets — we exhibit common physical attributes along two dimensions: session length (how long we view) and physical posture (literally). Other physical variables, such as screen size, viewing distance, and viewing environment (home, office, transit) highly correlate to those two.

In the below grid, PC, TV, and mobile can be seen to occupy mostly discrete quadrants. However the newest platform, tablets, overlaps all of them and so is the most versatile. Its portability, screen size, and reliance on a large number of native apps have made it a viable stand-in for many users for all of the others. This flexibility is reflected in the continued, massive growth in tablet shipments, which IDC expects will exceed total PC shipments in 2015.

Note: The Session and Posture dimensions above, and the corresponding ones in the below chart, live on a spectrum. The items plotted on the grids are intended to be directionally accurate.

Mind: Engagement style

A year ago, software designer Craig Will proposed a different approach to succeed Nielsen’s Lean Forward/Back paradigm which he thought too simplistic and vague. He instead divided engagement style into absorption and activity levels. Think of absorption as representing retention resulting from focus, while activity is the frequency of user input.

The below table plots the most common consumer digital media tasks on an absorption — activity grid.

Like the Physical Attributes grid, certain tasks gravitate toward their own specific quadrants. For instance Recommendations (such as Netflix’s automated viewing suggestions), often appear by default for users and so are a Low Activity experience. But then another form of discovery, search, is a far more active endeavor. Communication about and curation of content ranges from creating music playlists and reviewing books to tweeting about TV shows and “liking” movies. These activities require our full, albeit fleeting, attention.

Consumption — the task of reading, watching, listening, and playing — demands various degrees of engagement, depending on the content and context.

Implications

Taken together, these two interaction models present a far more complete and real world accounting for how consumers interact with their media. Employing it could help the industry address some of its most stubborn problems. Here are just a few examples.

The connected-TV movement, exemplified by the variable smart TVs and Google’s recent entry, Chromecast, is poised to deliver a far greater amount of Web-native content to television sets. The long-anticipated Web invasion of the living room will require though that content and its design are optimized for the Physical Attributes above.

Charging consumers for many forms of digital content still continues to be difficult as well. Indeed, books and video games, as illustrated in the above grid, are digital content types consumers value enough to purchase.

Marketers seeking to reach highly engaged consumers are well advised to direct their advertising dollars to the upper right quadrant of the Engagement Style grid. For example, fans watching live sports on television and calling up stats on a second-screen iPad app are a highly valued advertising target.

This proposed model describes today’s digital media landscape, but of course we are still crossing over from our all-analog past to the all-digital future, when consumers will be able to access any content on any device, anywhere, at any time.

David Justus is a principal at contentcurrents.com, a digital media consultancy. Follow him on Twitter @ContentCurrents.

But one replacement product that I wouldn’t use? An RSS news reader from Facebook.

In one sense, it wouldn’t be surprising for Facebook to launch an RSS reader at its press event next Thursday in Menlo Park, as some people have speculated. Anyone using Google Reader has to find a replacement by July 1, and it’s still a pretty wide-open market. Products like Feedly seem to have a head start, but there’s still time for someone to roll out a new product and win over users.

We’ve seen that Facebook has no problem quickly launching products to try to disrupt a growing market, even if it’s not a sure thing they’ll succeed. (Just look at Poke, the company’s challenge to Snapchat.) And between the company’s launch of hashtags last week to improve the real-time nature of the news feed (even if I think hashtags are better saved for ironic conversation), and the addition of new tabs for following people on the new News Feed, Facebook clearly has ambitions to be more of a resource for news. (After all, brands and advertisers love the real-time nature of constantly updated live events and news.)

But as a hardcore Google Reader user, I have no interest in using an RSS reader replacement from Facebook, and there are several reasons why it seems like an ill-suited product for the social platform.

The appeal of Google Reader was that it was a reliable tool for importing and consuming news — one that wasn’t influenced by trends. When I subscribe to a feed, I want to read everything in that feed. With Twitter and Facebook at my disposal, I don’t need another site to see articles that my friends are sharing. I rely on my RSS feeds for work to catch every item of technology news flowing across the internet every day — I need to see everything, not just what’s popular, to do my job. And I follow probably 20-30 blogs about topics like fashion or cooking, where the writers post infrequently but where want to read every one of their posts.

So why wouldn’t I look to Facebook to re-create this experience? Probably because I don’t want my RSS reader to be social — I have Twitter and the existing Facebook for social news. I don’t want all my friends to know that I read fashion blogs on a daily basis. I don’t want the news I read to influence the ads I see on Facebook, or the stories that show up in my news feed. As the Washington Post’s auto-sharing from its social reader experiment showed, people don’t want everyone to know what they’re reading.

Of course, we don’t know if Facebook is launching an RSS reader at all, let alone what it would look like. The company did not have any comment on the matter when we asked. But social sharing is embedded in Facebook’s DNA, so it’s a reasonable assumption that any RSS reader put out by Facebook would have serious social attributes, with a heavy emphasis on sharing.

Sure, there’s room for social news on Facebook. On my account, I “like” a lot of news outlets, as well as journalists and celebrities and business figures. In fact, a quick glance at my news feed would show mostly news stories, and very few posts from my friends. It’s a great way to see what’s popular right now in the news, or to catch an older story I might have missed on Twitter. But social news is a distinctly different experience from what people knew and loved about Google Reader — and that’s a distinction that a company like Digg seems to understand.

As I wrote previously, Digg’s new RSS news reader will likely incorporate some social features but will also serve as a separate product from the popular stories posted on Digg.com. And while Google Reader used to have much-beloved social features, these were complements, not a replacement, for the feeds themselves.

Would it make perfect sense for Facebook to create a dedicated spot on its site for news? Sure. But that likely wouldn’t keep me from searching for my next RSS relationship.