Content is inseparable from its medium.
The Most of the time we choose to focus our attention on the content over medium. The noise and other artifacts are generally not interesting in themselves.
If you want to help a new medium achieve independence, it helps to pay attention to its specifics. Artists spend time understanding the peculiarities of media, its texture, history, prejudices, etc. Mastery of a medium amounts to understanding what it can do and what others have done with it.
As audience we tend to overlook the texture of the medium. This is is an active procedure: we must sort out the signal from the carrier and noise. Using that radio metaphor, let's define the medium as carrier plus noise. While we're being specific, let's call this the texture of the medium.
The artifacts are the most honest part of representation. I love artifacts: they remind me of specific times in my life. Artifacts are powerful emotional transports, like smell. Watching reruns of Star Trek reruns with their layers of dust, scratches which belonged to shot on film (16mm I think), then telecine scan.
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The formal properties of digital media are completely different than film.
Discussion
I question the extent to which the assertion of active ignorance of the medium holds true in all cases. While it is certain that viewers traditionally focus on the content rather than the presentation, it seems to me that this is a learned behavior which is carried out effectively without conscious effort. Though this is a definite point of contention, it seems that for most audiences, the aim of the cinematic experience is to transport the viewer more or less seamlessly into a distinct environment and set of sense experiences. In this pursuit, the telltale artifacts of the medium can stand in the way of more complete identification. To that end, they may in fact be suppressed or ignored, but this denial of the materiality of the medium, rather than a conscious aim of the viewer, seems instead to take place only secondarily as the viewer focuses on the primary goal of engagement with the work's content.