"Intelligence is defined not by how smart you are, but how well an organism adapts to change in an environment," said Bill Buxton, principal researcher at Microsoft Research, paraphrasing the renowned biologist Jean Piaget to more than 800 members of Canada's media industry this morning.

As the opening address at the Canadian Media Directors' Council (CMDC) annual conference in Toronto, Buxton's thoughts on the future of the media environment were a fitting start to an event dedicated to the "congestion, culture and content" of the country's shifting media landscape.

As a former musician and composer, computer science professor and resident at Xerox's famed Palo Alto Research Center, Buxton has extensive experience creating and innovating with technology. In the early '80s, he was involved in developing a multi-touch device that would evolve over time into the Microsoft Surface.

But in the race to utilize the latest technologies, Buxton said, media companies often overlook the fact that gadgets are meant to convey information to human beings.

"The discourse normally around this is ‘Will it be the Kindle or the iPad? Is something else going to come out that's really cool?' " Buxton said. "All of those conversations are so five minutes ago and specious, they're not worth the breath it takes to have them. It's not about the technology."

Rather than developing a strategy based on devices that will be outdated in a matter of years, companies should build ideas around the human behaviors that unite them.

"The only thing that matters is reading. Anyone who uses the word ‘reading' [to mean] a singular thing doesn't get it...Reading a technical report [and] reading a Harlequin romance on a beach bear very little resemblance to one another."

However, Buxton also took issue with the idea that "Internet" and "digital" are considered separate channels from other media.

Pointing to Esquire's 75th anniversary issue from 2008, which used electronic ink on its cover, and Entertainment Weekly's two-page ad spread for CBS last year that included a small video screen with 40 minutes of content, he made a case that digital technology has already intruded in other media channels. Out-of-home and print, he said, have become subsets of "digital."

Within five years, he said, "It will be cheaper, per square foot, to put up a high-resolution colour display than to put up a white board of the same size. If you're not thinking that way, then you're not getting it right."